Re: [Xweb-developers] Reactivating development

[murphee (W. Schuster) <wer...@ne...>]

Peter Becker wrote:

Hey, great to see some action in the Xweb project again;


> Other things I'd like to see:
> - globbing and regexp for <entryset>s and <fileset>s -- that should 
> match things like "*.xml" to "*.html" conversions

thats great; I suppose it would be possible to bulk-copy whole 
directories of files instead of having to copy them individually;


> - support for more operations, e.g. JTidy and FOP, maybe Freemarker 
> (http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/) or (rather later) things similar to 
> this: http://www.mullassery.com/software/ANT/index.jsp or this: 
> http://www.oopsconsultancy.com/software/xmltask.html -- I wonder if 
> integrating Ant tasks in general would be hard.

Well, how about making more use of Ant for XWeb; mostly for dependancy
checking; maybe split up the processing model upon several Ant tasks
that can then be used;




> - a large refactoring towards a process-oriented model with at least two 
> iterations through the chains (prepare, do)

Some dependancy checking would be great; mostly to allow incremental
builds instead of the monolithic full rebuilds each time;


> Jon wants to have a go at the frontend bit, at least some tree 
> manipulations with a text editor pane, 

There is also my 2 year old (currently not active) project called
Webbuilder, basically a GUI for XWeb. At
http://www.angelfire.com/co/werners/developerzone/webbuilder.html
you can get the tar.gz and some overview of the structure;
Its about 2 years old, so I suppose the code is not uptodate.
But it can manipulate Xweb files (as far as I remember);


One point I wanted to do was use Ant extensively, for preprocessing,
postprocessing and for deployment; the Webbuilder Archive contains
a sample project.xml that does this (I think deployment only);
it also contains an Ant Xweb task, that does not really do anything
besides call XWeb.main();

The basic idea of Webbuilder was to allow users to manipulate
the Xweb tree and also manipulate the build process (which is
realized with Ant);

Webbuilder is only a prototype, but if there is interest in the thing,
I could put it on Sourceforge and do some work on it again;


Oh yeah... the changes in Xweb might some day also fix the problem
with creating Websites that use relative links, that would really
be useful for creating local documentation etc.

murphee
-- 
Werner Schuster (murphee)
Student of SoftwareEngineering and KnowledgeManagement
Maintainer of the OGO-JOGI Project @ http://ogo-jogi.sourceforge.net/