Dienstag, 21. Mai 2002

Cocoon Portal and REST Just came accross this in Leighs last-week column on REST: Apache Cocoon already offers a useful array of functionality in this space. The concept of a "sitemap" binds processing pipelines to HTTP requests, with the pipeline inputs being any mixture of static and dynamic resources. As the sitemap and pipeline definitions are themselves XML documents, one can imagine a suite of tools to allow point-and-click creation of services using Cocoon components. The Cocoon portal already makes use of this and in fact the example services integrated are accessed using URIs. Moreover.com is the main provider we used to build the sample coplets. XML news in RSS format can be accessed from Moreover via a URI. Adding new external data is therefore as easy as defining the pipeline in the sitemap. Like this: <map:match pattern="sunspotdemocoplet-online-*.xml"> <map:generate src="http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?index_{1}+xml"/> <map:transform src="sunspotdemo/styles/coplet_MoreoverDotCom.xsl"/> <map:serialize type="xml"/> </map:match>   Notice how the generator (map:generate) then goes "out" and fetches the news from moreover. The returned format is then formatted - using a stylesheet - into a simple HTML table for inclusion into the main portal pipeline. This is made easy because the news is returned in RSS - so we can use the same stylesheet for all the feeds. A presentation on the portal is here.

Welcome! Martin has a weblog. He will be discussing things like eclipse and sunBow - a commercial Cocoon IDE over there. In fact that means that the complete open source group at S&N now has weblogs!

Things I heard at Jax2002 Forgot to add these last week - but some interesting pieces of information I picked up at Jax2002 last week - all heard in presentations: "SOAP messages can be sent using HTTP, SMTP or ftp" "The Cocoon distribution contains Axis" "Cocoon (2) consists mainly of XSP code. There is very little Java in it." - Carsten nearly jumped for the throat :-).