Reliable XML/XSL editors for Cocoon development ?

[Laurent Perez <ha...@gmail.com>]

Hello

We are using Dreamweaver for our current websites design, producing
xhtml pages - templates - containing custom tags that once hosted on
our server are being replaced on the fly by database data, which is a
very classic setup, I guess :)

We'll be moving to a Cocoon based backend soon, mostly for enterprise
needs (i.e we need to host and access various SOAP web-services - Java
behind -, and exchange XML flows with our clients, which are in the
publishing industry, I assume Cocoon is the right choice), but I'm
currently trying to figure out if Cocoon can be a reliable solution to
manage several web sites (I do not mean "web applications" here, only
"sites", like small sites based on a small database) : afaik, you have
two popular methods to output website content, XSP versus
Flowscript+JX, which is fine but both are very "code-based", I mean
websites designers are not Java or XML experts (or both).

My problem is that our designers - they did spend several days
evaluating Cocoon - are afraid to move from our current DW+PHP
backend, because they think the whole "sitemap > pattern hit > xsp or
flowscript + jx > transformer > result" is just too obscure and
difficult to dig into, ie when editing a website you have to remember
the whole sitemap schema, especially when using aggregates. I also
don't understand the right choice between having a mega-huge xsl sheet
able to transform every page on our site based on call-templates or
"one xsl per page transformation" path. Plus they told me XSP was
similar to our PHP approach but was an obsolete (?) framework, and
Flowscripts look nice but require a huge Java knowledge. What I am
looking for is an editor being able to handle Cocoon-based websites :
for example, something being able to traverse a sitemap, find all
matching patterns, build a tree of patterns, output the resulting xml
flows (from xsp or jx sources), and visually edit elements of the xsl
sheet. Dreamweaver has no clue about XML/XSL editing, XMLSpy has no
clue about visual editing, Eclipse has never been a web editor, and
Cocoon Wiki is dry on visual editors reviews.

What are you guys using when dealing with 'pure' website design and
management under Cocoon ? Thanks for any input :)

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Re: Reliable XML/XSL editors for Cocoon development ?

[Andrew M <an...@jibeya.com>]

Laurent,
try the latest version of eclipse (www.eclipse.org), and then download 
the xml plugin from Bocaloco software (http://www.xmlbuddy.com/).

Andrew
On 23 Nov 2004, at 14:36, Laurent Perez wrote:

> Hello
>
> We are using Dreamweaver for our current websites design, producing
> xhtml pages - templates - containing custom tags that once hosted on
> our server are being replaced on the fly by database data, which is a
> very classic setup, I guess :)
>
> We'll be moving to a Cocoon based backend soon, mostly for enterprise
> needs (i.e we need to host and access various SOAP web-services - Java
> behind -, and exchange XML flows with our clients, which are in the
> publishing industry, I assume Cocoon is the right choice), but I'm
> currently trying to figure out if Cocoon can be a reliable solution to
> manage several web sites (I do not mean "web applications" here, only
> "sites", like small sites based on a small database) : afaik, you have
> two popular methods to output website content, XSP versus
> Flowscript+JX, which is fine but both are very "code-based", I mean
> websites designers are not Java or XML experts (or both).
>
> My problem is that our designers - they did spend several days
> evaluating Cocoon - are afraid to move from our current DW+PHP
> backend, because they think the whole "sitemap > pattern hit > xsp or
> flowscript + jx > transformer > result" is just too obscure and
> difficult to dig into, ie when editing a website you have to remember
> the whole sitemap schema, especially when using aggregates. I also
> don't understand the right choice between having a mega-huge xsl sheet
> able to transform every page on our site based on call-templates or
> "one xsl per page transformation" path. Plus they told me XSP was
> similar to our PHP approach but was an obsolete (?) framework, and
> Flowscripts look nice but require a huge Java knowledge. What I am
> looking for is an editor being able to handle Cocoon-based websites :
> for example, something being able to traverse a sitemap, find all
> matching patterns, build a tree of patterns, output the resulting xml
> flows (from xsp or jx sources), and visually edit elements of the xsl
> sheet. Dreamweaver has no clue about XML/XSL editing, XMLSpy has no
> clue about visual editing, Eclipse has never been a web editor, and
> Cocoon Wiki is dry on visual editors reviews.
>
> What are you guys using when dealing with 'pure' website design and
> management under Cocoon ? Thanks for any input :)
>
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@cocoon.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@cocoon.apache.org
>
>


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Re: Reliable XML/XSL editors for Cocoon development ?

[Bertrand Delacretaz <bd...@apache.org>]

Le 23 nov. 04, à 15:36, Laurent Perez a écrit :

> ...What I am
> looking for is an editor being able to handle Cocoon-based websites :
> for example, something being able to traverse a sitemap, find all
> matching patterns, build a tree of patterns, output the resulting xml
> flows (from xsp or jx sources), and visually edit elements of the xsl
> sheet....

I don' think you'll find something today that will make people coming 
from a visual Dreamweaver-like environment comfortable with Cocoon. I'd 
love to be proven wrong though, but it's not only the XSLT, there are 
the sitemaps, database access code, etc. as you have noticed.

Depending on the size and scope of your project, it might be 
interesting to create some "adaptors" to make it possible for your 
people to design publishing templates more or less as they're doing 
today and use them in Cocoon. But there's (AFAIK) no turnkey solution 
to do this today, and it's not a trivial project.

Another interesting possibility would be to use Cocoon as a back-end 
for database access and XML data generation only, and couple this 
(REST-like probably) with your existing PHP/Dreamweaver setup used as a 
front-end only. For the back-end you'll need more technical skills than 
your team (IIUC) has today, but the potential improvements in 
flexibility and data exchanges might be well worth it.

And yes, we don't recommend using XSP for new projects, most of this 
community's efforts are focused on the "Power Trio" (Pipelines, Flow, 
Forms) today.

If yours is basically a database reporting application, XReporter 
(http://www.cocoondev.org/xreporter) might be an option maybe.

Finally, here's my shameless plug of the day: you might find my GT 2004 
presentation interesting on these subjects, it's available at 
http://cocoon.apache.org/mirror.cgi under "material from events / gt 
2004".

Hope this helps!
-Bertrand