[Xweb-developers] Re: Reactivating development

[Peter B. <pe...@pe...>]

[redirected back to list, fully quoted]

Hendrik Lipka wrote:

>Monday, November 10, 2003, 3:38:01 AM, you wrote:
>
>  
>
>>What was the reason not to go with an InfoBus? I am currently trying to
>>understand the Bean world and I wonder if I should use some of the ideas 
>>in XWeb itself.
>>    
>>
>
>I think InfoBus is a little bit too complicated. Most projects need only an
>easy way to distribute events about changes / actions to multiple
>components w/o knowing each of them. Jst look at the InfoBus spec
>(http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/infobus/spec12/IB12Spec.htm):
>it is only about data exchange between components, and IMHO it gives too
>much overhead:
>Step 1. Membership - establishing InfoBus participation
>Step 2. Listening for InfoBus events
>Step 3. Rendezvous on the data to be exchanged
>Step 4. Navigation of structured data
>Step 5. Retrieval of an encoding of the data value
>Step 6. Optional: changing data
>
>Thats why most projects write their own bus system (I have even done this
>by myself :)
>  
>
So I have not to be too embarrassed to write my own publish-subscribe 
system in form of an EventBroker :-) Any comments on the BeanContexts?

>>I don't see that as compelling, a little UNIX script would do the same.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, you can do many things with a shell script - as long as you run on
>Unix. But FTPing something to a website is npot a thing I want to do in a
>shell script...
>
>  
>
>>Of course being able to call XWeb from Ant is nice to create 
>>cross-platform solutions, but I don't see the need for a further 
>>integration.
>>    
>>
>
>The reasons to go with ANT is:
>- its cross-platform
>- it has _many_ tasks, all in one place
>- powerful file/directory tasks (you can even rename files during file
>  operations)
>- possibility to call many external tools
>  
>
I don't mind integrating XWeb into Ant to a certain degree, I think that 
is defintely a good idea -- I use Ant for pretty much all my projects. 
And I agree that it is a quite powerful tool -- also I wouldn't say it 
is better than a shell, it is too close in its idea to a shell 
script/makefile. But the cross-platform thing is definitely a plus. I 
love having only one set of build instructions :-) And not everyone 
running Windows runs Cygwin as they should ;-)

The point I want to make is that Ant is a developers tool and that the 
XWeb integration needed in this context seems to be only the XWeb task 
for Ant. The frontend I imagine would be more for someone setting up a 
small website without many IT skills -- I suspect Webbuilder has a 
different target audience, also I think that audience is hard to target 
with a GUI. Just look at how many people still code Java with vi or 
Emacs ;-) I never used much in terms of IDEs for C++, but with Java and 
Refactoring it is a bit different.

>>The Ant task as you described -- just called the main 
>>process from within Ant, seems quite appropriate. Maybe some extra 
>>options like configuring the baseURL or some parameters might be helpful.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, something like that would help. My idea how to build my website is:
>- I want to call a _single_ program/script, which should do everything:
>  - generate project documentation in XML
>  
>
That should be covered, shouldn't it? I never really checked the Java 
range of documentation generation since I sticked with basic JavaDoc so 
far, but I imagine there is something XMLish. I know that Doxygen 
supports XML export, but that is of course not Java.

>  - copy this in to the website source
>  - run XWeb
>  - determine which files have been changed since the last run
>  
>
Does Ant give support for that? I wonder if an Ant task for XWeb could 
return a <fileset> with the changes. Or is it possible to turn URL lists 
into <fileset>s?

>  - transfer this changed file to the website
>  - optionally: delete old file from the website
>  
>
That's a tricky one. I wonder how much garbage due to renaming I have 
created in my webspaces by now. Sometimes I do a big cleanup.

>Most of this could be done from ANT, and makes not _that_ much sense in
>XWeb. Maybe others have different needs...
>  
>
I'd like to see some of the update management in XWeb. At the moment my 
thinking goes towards:
- adding time stamps into the makefile DOM during processing,
- copy a full version of the DOM, including all the extra bits like 
images created and these timestamps into the output
- use this for diffs and in combination with dependency analysis for 
incremental updates, it would also provide the information which files 
are gone and could be deleted

The first bit has the nice extra effect that it could provide 
stylesheets with a "last updated on..." opportunity.

The XWeb frontend should definitely have some upload capacities. As said 
before: I see a completely different target audience for that.

   Peter