Lake McManus wrote:
Alright well if I haven't already made it blatantly obvious, I'm new to the
whole Forrest/Cocoon thing, and the documentation is hardly useful for someone
trying to figure out how to use it and more useful as a reference for someone
who already knows it. I'm also inexperienced with servlets, containers, and
webapps, though I do know Java. Would you mind explaining how I would
integrate Forrest, along with other components such as PHP, into an Apache
server, using what you mentioned below? Thank you so much for your help, and
for putting up with me!
Yes, it is true our docs could be imporved considerably. When you
understand more we would welcome patches and contributions.
The best thing for me to do in answering your questions is to point you
to docs that *should* answer your questions, you go and read them,
experiment a little and come back here with more questions as they
become more focussed on specific problems rather than wide, general issues.
First of all, using Forrest inside a Servlet engine alongside Apache HTTPD:
It is not really within the scope of this user list to get this
configured. You will find more immediate help on the user list for your
chosen serlet engine. If you do not currently have one then I recomend
Apache Tomcat http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/
They have extensive docs on getting tomcat installed and deploying webapps.
Once you have this up and running you can create a webapp from Forrest
with the command "forrest webapp", deploy the resulting war file in
tomcat and off you go.
I suggest you first try deploying an unmodified seed site from forrest,
see http://forrest.apache.org/#User-friendly for instructions on
creating a seed site. Just replace step 4 and 5 with the above "forrest
webapp" steps and you should be working.
Now to integrating PHP.
First of all, consider wether you really want to do this. PHP is an
adequate language but there are, IMHO, opinion better languages
available through Cocoon (on which Forrest is bilt). If you still want
to work with PHP then here is what you do:
Play around with Forrest doing some static pages using XML first. Get
used to how Forrest works. Integrating PHP is an advanced activity and
as a newbie you should spend some time understanding Forrest in its
simplest form first. Start with
http://forrest.apache.org/docs_0_70/your-project.html
Conmfortable? Now re-read the advanced customisations section of the
above page. This will give an example of how to customise the processing
within Forrest. The part you are particularly interested in is the
additions to the sitemap. There is a link to a sitemap reference in that
section, you must read that reference - it is important background
information.
By the time you have read all this you should know what to do. Here is a
hint that you will not understand until you have read all the above:
<map:match pattern="**.php.xml">
<map:generate src="http://localhost/{1}.php"; />
<map:serialize type="xml"/>
</map:match>
This assumes that you php scripts output XDoc, if not then you will need
a transformation to convert from the source format to XDoc (we have
stylesheets and plugins for many formats so if this is the case ask
before writing).
With this match requests for http:///domain.org/index.php.html will give
a skinned HTML version of the page, http:///domain.org/index.php.pdf
will give PDF etc.
There is *another* way of doing this Cocoon is able to execute PHP pages
natively. However, I think the generator is deprecated now, so I'm not
sure if you want to use that route.
Ross
--
Lake McManus～马雷～ﾚｲｸ･ﾐｸﾏｰﾅｽ～ْلَيكْ مِكْمَنُس～लेक् मिक्मानस
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Impermanent are all created things; strive on with awareness."
-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Gardler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 2005 August 27 09:33
To: user@forrest.apache.org
Subject: Re: Forrest as a Module
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
