RE: [MO-java-dev] Web site generation question

[Vincent M. <vm...@pi...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: moc...@li...
> [mailto:moc...@li...] On Behalf Of
> Jeff Martin
> Sent: 14 May 2003 18:15
> To: 'Mockobjects-Java-Dev'
> Subject: Re: [MO-java-dev] Web site generation question
> 
> On Wed, 2003-05-14 at 16:11, Vincent Massol wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been trying the web site generation by going in doc/ and typing
> > "ant -f site.xml site".
> >
> > However, I was surprised to find that the generated HTML in out/
does
> > not come from the xdocs but from static HTML files in doc/html
> >
> > Could someone tell me what's the status and where the project is
going
> > for web site generation?
> 
> Basically we ran into problems with the xdocs stuff. As far as I know
> style book has never had an official release and there was several
> different incompatible version floating around at one time. This made
it
> very difficult for someone to just checkout the project and build the
> website.

Yes, stylebook is dead. But that shouldn't have been an issue. Just put
the stylebook jar in the project lib.

> 
> People were also saying they where put off editing the docs because of
> the unfamiliar syntax.

Never heard that one yet... :-) I'm surprised any jakarta project gets
any doc written at all in this case... :-)

> 
> Since all you really need for most of the site is a template to wrap
the
> menus around the pages it seemed fairly easy to use very simple html
> pages and a little bit of java to wrap them in the template.

Yes, that's the point of the xdocs... :-) They use a simplified HTML
syntax that has not style in it ;-)

As for the java part, are we reinventing XSL? :-) 

Over on Cactus land, we have a simple XSL stylesheet to transform our
xdocs to HTML and it works very nicely (check:
http://jakarta.apache.org/cactus). If you're interested in could make
our xdocs works with it?

> 
> This way we get away from the external dependencies & people can use
any
> old html editor to edit the pages.

Fine, but HMTL editors will almost always add lots of style elements and
are usually not able to conform to a given DTD... Better use a good XML
editor.

> 
> >
> > Would you like to move to Maven for building the mockobjects project
in
> > the future? If so, I can very quickly migrate the doc generation to
> > Maven and produce a site which looks like (http://maven.apache.org).
> >
> 
> Don't have to much of a problem with this if you want to do it. Though
> I'm getting lazy these days and resent having to install anything I
> can't just get from www.jpackage.org (can't see maven there yet), and
> I've looked on the maven site and can't see any mention of how you
> manage adhoc pages within the site or what syntax is used. You've
> probably got a much better handle on this than me.

Ok, what I can do if you're interested is simply bring the Cactus
stylesheets and adapt the xdocs to match.

Thanks Jeff for the explanation! Now we need to know what we want:
- remove the xdocs from CVS altogether?
- or continue to use the xdocs (which are really simplified HTML) and
simply perform a simple XSLT transform (using the Ant <style> task)?

Thanks
-Vincent

> 
> --
> 
> jeff martin
> information technologist
> mkodo limited
> 
> mobile: 44 (0) 78 55 478 331
> phone: 44 (0) 20 77 29 45 45
> email: jef...@mk...
> 
> www.mkodo.com
> 
> 73 Leonard St, London, EC2A 4QS. U.K