Introducing Guilder

[Ugo Cei <ug...@apache.org>]

Guilder is a little graphical interface whose aim is to simplify the 
life of Cocoon newbies by providing:

- easy selection of blocks and features, taking dependencies in due 
consideration
- starting the build
- starting and stopping Cocoon via Jetty

Most of the programming has been done by my colleague Daniele Madama 
(d.madama AT pronetics DOT it), who already introduced his work in this 
thread [1]. This is just a first, rough version, but we wanted to 
commit it as soon as possible, following the OSS mantra of "release 
early, release often" and what better occasion than the GetTogether to 
do it? Much work remains to be done, like for instance:

- polishing the UI
- stopping Jetty (does not work at the moment)
- showing the progress of the build in a window
- etc.

but now that the code is available, if you want to contribute you can 
check out the code from [2] and start hacking away. Just use "ant" to 
build it. It will copy a JAR file in Cocoon's directory (by default 
"../../BRANCHES_2_1_X" but you can ovveride it in guilder.properties) 
and you should then launch it by moving to Cocoon's home directory and 
running "java -jar tools/lib/guilder.jar".

It is our hope that this tool will make Cocoon more popular by 
presenting a simpler approach than what is provided by the present 
installation procedure, which might scare some users away. Once it is 
sufficiently polished, we could simply distribute the jar together with 
every Cocoon release, as this is a simple addition that does not change 
in any other way the existing build.

Guilder is just for Cocoon 2.1. The configuration and build procedure 
in the coming major releases will be very different and won't probably 
need such a tool, but it is expected that many people will be working 
with 2.1 for a long time still.

Why the name "Guilder"?

The original name was "Cocoon builder" but soon it became something 
more than a simple builder. We also wanted to emphasize the "GUI" 
aspect. Since I am in Amsterdam right now, the name "Guilder" came up 
naturally. "Guilder" (gulden in Dutch) was the name of the Dutch 
currency before the Euro.

	Ugo

[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=112722937629151&w=2
[2] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/cocoon/whiteboard/guilder

-- 
Ugo Cei
Tech Blog: http://agylen.com/
Open Source Zone: http://oszone.org/
Wine & Food Blog: http://www.divinocibo.it/


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@cocoon.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@cocoon.apache.org