Re: [TM4J-users] TM4J project web site & XTM (was RE: new member)

[Kal A. <ka...@te...>]

At 10:09 22/11/2001 +0100, Gerd Mueller wrote:
>On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 23:25:34 +0100 (MET)
>Florian Haas <f.g...@gm...> wrote:
>
> > [Kal]
> > > There are lots of options here:
> > >
> > > XSLT only - good for static websites. May be restricted in functionality
> > > JSP only  -  good for dynamic websites. Full access to API functionality
> > > but requires Java coding skills
> > > JSP with XSLT - good for dynamic websites Full access to API. Styling
> > > could
> > > be provided through XSLT without requiring Java coding.
> > > JSP with Velocity - good for dynamic and static websistes. Potentially
> > > full
> > > access to API (may require an interface layer between the Java API and
> > > Velocity - though that should be quite thin). Site developers can work
> > > without needing to know any Java - although some functionality might
> > > require quite a lot of scripting
> > > JSP with Velocity and XSLT - Dynamic and static websites. Site 
> developers
> > > don't need to know any Java. Velocity could be used to generate XML 
> which
> > > is styled with XSLT.
> > > [...]
> >
> > Let me just pitch in one quick thought, as I'm really tired tonight and
> > ought to get some sleep: what about Cocoon?
>
>+1 from me. I've already built a simple TopicMap navigation tool
>with TM4J on top of Cocoon. But to be honest, I don't know Velocity
>very good, so I'm not sure about the pro's and con's. What I don't
>like on JSP is the concept of writing Java Code in my HTML site.
>Also, does it always need to be HTML when I use JSP ? Or is it also
>possible to use XML ? I wouldn't like to be fixed on HTML. The
>XML/XSLT approach it much flexible. E.g. we could print all the
>stuff to PDF which is no problem with Cocoon.

Cocoon would be interesting to look at. I followed it in its early releases 
but gave up when Cocoon 2 started to look Too Hard (tm ;-) Perhaps it is 
time to face that fear and revisit it. Cocoon's flexible styling would 
defn. be an advantage. However, if we are talking about large maps held in 
a backend such as Ozone, it would be impractical to run the XTM 
representation of the whole map through Cocoon each time we want to deliver 
a single page, so we need some method to serialize fragments of the topic 
map. JSP can provide that mechanism (it isn't limited to HTML) - in fact 
you can use the XSL document() function to invoke a JSP which generates the 
XML input to the XSLT processing...thats quite cool ;-)

Apart from the ability to swap stylesheets, what other advantages does 
Cocoon offer ? Can anyone summarize them for us ?

Cheers,

Kal