On Jun 18, 2006, at 5:53 AM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
We have a need to deploy a WebObjects application for (hopefully)
20-50 sites, possibly more. Each site will run as a separate
instance (or two) but the application code is identical. Each
application will be running as a separate Apache virtual host with
different images, css, etc. The main difficulty we are having now
is deciding how to manage and deploy the html. Although very many
of the html pages will be identical (particularly the smaller
components), the front page, the layout, and a couple of other
pages may vary between the sites.
We have thought about some ideas:
* keep pages in the database which override certain html in
the .woa. We need to write some code to check the database for
relevant html upon each page request.
* put the common pages and code into a framework and make changes
in the .woa directly. Version control might get a little tricky.
* have one project and code, but use subversion to maintain
separate html repositories which get copied into the .woa when we
deploy. No special deployment code, but some tricks to managing
development processes.
Each of these approaches seem to have their pros and cons. Has
anyone else had a similar challenge and found a successful solution?
One pretty standard trick is to override the method that loads the
templates to load a different .html file based on values in the session.
That is, a .wo "file" is really a folder with:
blah.wo:
blah.html
blah.wod
There's no reason you can't do:
blah.wo:
blah.html <--- default, loaded if no override found
blah.skin1.html
blah.skin2.html
blah.wod
Then you don't even need separate instances, just separate entry
points. The .wod file is usually a superset of the requirements of
all the .html files.
Another method relies on the fact that WebObjects will look for
components in a certain order, so if the search order is:
skin1
main project
Any .wo files in skin1 will be loaded over those in the main project.
Finally, you can use the existing localization support.
In other sites, I've built a mini-CMS that allowed people to store
HTML bits in the database, then the site would pull that HTML out and
shove it here and there. That has its limitations, because it's more
work to pull stuff out of a database, then have WebObjects parse it
for WO tags.
Pierce
WOTip: Set things to NULL when you're done with them. It makes the
JVM happy, and saves you GC time later.
More Tips: http://www.twinforces.com
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