Re: [Proposal] Fake Forrest

[Nicola Ken Barozzi <ni...@apache.org>]

CCing to Forrest-dev, as IMHO it's interesting.

Christoph Wilhelms wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> I'd like to tell you, that I like the design by APACHE-XML-FORREST team very
> much and I'd like to see the Ant site in the same design. For I am not very
> familiar with XSLT, not willing to change our XML-Files and I have certain
> knowledge of Velocity/Anakia/VTL I've spend some time today to convert our
> vsl's to generate html-pages, that look like they've been Forrest-generated.
> I hope the Forrest team can forgive me ;-).

hehehe, ok, I forgive you ;-)

Actually I'm quite impressed by the result; you have also come up with 
bixed headers that our skin doesn't have but that some users requested, 
so I'll take from work too :-)

> You can take a look at first results on a private homepage, where I've
> loaded it up to: http://www.jgui.org/fakeforrest/index.html (beware of some
> broken links there ;))
> 
> If you want to test it with Velocity: I've appended a ZIP with containing
> the necessary files. It should work with nearly any Anakia xdocs on Apache
> and Jakarta, but I've just tested with our ant-xdocs.
> 
> Some minor things have to be fixed, though! :)
> 
> This approach has certain advantages and disadvantages to be discussed:
> 
> + We do not have to change ANY of our website xml documents
> + We have the nice Forrest-design in no time
> - It's NOT Forrest and it's not as flexible (e.g. PDF-Creation)

This can be fixed at a later date.

I imagine that a next step would be to start using our Forrest DTD, and 
add validation to the mix. The result would be that a later migration to 
Forrest would be basically painless, and give users the choice of using 
Velocity or Forrest to get the same visual effect.
We will be soon having much more functionality (coming are RSS feeds for 
changes), but for the meantime, it's intriguing...

> And some I can't think of ATM: It's 3:33 AM :) *yawn*
> 
> I see this just as a first step in migrating to Forrest - what do you think?

Very interesting indeed :-)

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nicolaken@apache.org
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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