Lake McManus wrote:
In my opinion, Forrest would be much more useful as a module.
Forrest is a webapp for hosting in a Servlet engine. It is a completely different beast to an HTTPD module (I guess that is what you mean by module). Of course, the servlet container itself can be run as an HTTPD module.
Despite what the Forrest website says, I can’t understand how Forrest can be used for dynamic pages
See our home page [1] and the docs at [2] which describes the dynamic mode in more detail.
In short you can do 'forrest run' and point your browser at http://localhost:8888 (the port is of course configurable, and you can poit at it from an external machine if you want to). In a production environment you probably want to do 'forrest webapp' and deploy on your favourite servlet container.
[1] http://forrest.apache.org/#Static+or+Dynamic [2] http://forrest.apache.org/docs_0_70/your-project.html#webapp
Making it a module would allow this. That would make a lot more sense than having to run Forrest every time you update the site, especially if you’re not running Forrest on the server. At first I thought Forrest would be something like that, but it took me a while to realize, to my dismay, that it wasn’t.
On the contrary - that is *exactly* what forrest does when you run in dynamic mode. You should also appreciate that Forrest is designed to allow static content to be created since most content is, in fact, static and therefore is much more efficiently served by a web server. If you have dynamic needs then run in dynamic mode.
Having Forrest as a module would also increase functionality with server-site scripting like PHP. That way, PHP could produce Forrest-compatible code, and then Forrest would process it.
It already can. This is made really easy with the locationmap in 0.8-dev, however, it is still achievable in 0.7 if you write a custom sitemap for your project.
Furthermore, Forrest is built on top of Cocoon, so we have the full power of Cocoon in the dynamic environment.
Is there any effort being made toward this?
Errr... just in case you haven't noticed with my replies above, it already does everything you ask for :-P
And is there a reason that it wasn’t developed like a module or CGI in the first place?
Because it is much more powerful and efficient as a Cocoon application. Ross
