Re: Deployment of Cocoon apps. Best practices?

[Ralph Goers]

David Leangen wrote: Hi, Ralph! Thanks for your quick and helpful reply! :o) What do you mean? Where else would they be but WEB-INF/lib? Are you meaning when they are deployed? Oh, ok, I think I see what you mean. So you're essentially obtaining a compiled webapp, so we can pretty much safely assume that all the JARs will always be in WEB-INF/lib... Also, do you use the latest CVS version or do you use a more stable release? I use the latest stable release and apply my own patches as necessary. I actually put the cocoon src zip file in the maven repository and put patch files there as well so that others could build what is in production if they needed to. Sorry if this is a silly question, but what do you mean by "patch files"? If you look at the maven.xml file I attached to an earlier response you will see an xpatch task defined.  This uses Cocoon's XConfToolTask to patch the root sitemap.xmap, cocoon.xconf, and any other XML files I might want to "patch".  If you look at the blocks, many of them have a conf directory that has patch files in them. I believe this is documented on the wiki.  Typically, I only modify the root sitemap to remove a couple of pipelines and to patch in decent pool values. Eric's approach seems to depend less on the structure of how Cocoon is built, but seems to require the developer to manually track the JARs. Ralph's approach solves the problem of manually tracking the JARs... but it seems that it depends on how the Cocoon project is structured. Or am I mistaken? You are correct. I initially did what Eric is doing but found that it was a real pain to upgrade all the cocoon blocks and dependencies with each release. I also assume that Cocoon has been tested with the jars it ships with so using anything else, in my mind, is not supported. Ok, that makes sense. Thanks for sharing this with me. I guess what I'm really interested in is completely automating the build, so it works without any intervention even when Cocoon is updated. Is this even possible, do you think? Well, I build cocoon, put the war file, cocoon.jar, cocoon-testcase.jar and cocoon-anttask (I build that from the anttask directory) in the maven repository and then update a couple of files with the new release umber and I am done. I only put cocoon.jar and cocoon-testcase there because I have custom components that require them at compile time. They are not used when building the webapp. Ok, I see. What about your xml (or xdoc or whatever) files + stylesheets? I suppose that you probably have various projects going on that use Cocoon... how do you manage those projects and merge them into your Cocoon build? They all use the same Cocoon war.  Each project has a file structure like: project -  maven.xml -  project.xml -  project.properties -  config    - various patch files for the xpatch task -  src     -  java        -  java source subdirectories     -  webapp        -  WEB-INF            -  web.xml (replacement for Cocoon's)        -  directory named after project           -  sitemap.xmap           -  project.roles (actually, also named after the project).           -  project subdirectories, each with their own sitemap. Maven unwars the cocoon war file into the target directory, compiles any java source, performs the patches in the config directory, copies the web.xml and the project directory (and subdirectories) and then creates a new war file.  This happens for every project, if we want a separate webapp.  To merge them we would need a project with multiple project subdirectories. Most everything else would be the same. Thanks for the advice! Dave BTW, is there a reason you sent this off-list? I think your advice would be useful for others, too, if you're willing to share. Yeah. For some reason many of the emails I just do "reply" to from this list are directed to people, not the list.  That should never happen, IMO.  Sometimes I don't notice.  As a rule I never try to respond off the list. Ralph