Struts and Tiles app moving to Lenya

[Simon Walter <si...@hokkaidotracks.com>]

Hi all,

I have inherited an extremely poorly managed website where everything 
was coded by hand using Struts and Tiles and no DB. Any change required 
open Eclipse and editing Tile, .vm, .properties, and all sorts of files. 
It would be quicker and neater to write raw HTML. Needless to say, I 
want to do away with all this hand written XML and whatnot and use 
something more robust and manageable - Lenya.

However, there is one part of the app that I do not want to rewrite. I 
guess it's really the part of the "app" that is an app. It's uses SOAP 
to communicate with a server on the LAN that handles reservations. It 
checks for availability. Before my times, we outsourced the creation of 
this app.

The main thing I would like is not have to resort to using an iframe or 
maintaining the layout (css, images, menus, etc) for two different 
websites and try to make them look like one.

Has anyone done anything like this before? If so, first of all, I'd like 
to know if it's possible. Then if I can't figure it out, I may come back 
and ask for help. Another thing I'd like to ask advice on is: how much 
should I expect to be charged by the company, that we outsourced the 
creation of this app to, for them to integrate it with Lenya. They seem 
to be rip off artists. So I want to know what is reasonable.

You can see the website here:
http://www.htholidays.com/

The booking section is the part of the app I want to keep. Yes, it's a 
wreck. Which is why I'm trying to bring some order.

I've found a few hints in the archives about integrating Struts with 
Lenya, but nothing substantial.

Any help or advice is appreciated.

Thank you,

Simon

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Re: Struts and Tiles app moving to Lenya

[Simon Walter <si...@hokkaidotracks.com>]

Hi Vik,

Thanks for your reply.

Vik Tara wrote:
> Does your website communicate with the application using SOAP? What is
> the application written in?
>   

The website communicates via SOAP with the booking engine. I don't want 
to rewrite this part of the website. Right now the entire website is 
compiled into a war file and deployed on the tomcat server. I'd rather 
strip down the website, leaving only the booking forms etc, and handle 
the rest in Lenya. Though Lenya does seem to have great support for 
forms. Maybe We'll need to look at that in the future.

What Andreas mentioned sounds like what I'd like to do. Eventually we 
may look at rewriting the whole thing, but we can't have any down time. 
Managing the website by writing lines of XML rather than letting editors 
type words is getting to be pain really quick - and I've only been on 
the project 2 weeks...

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Re: Struts and Tiles app moving to Lenya

[Vik Tara <vi...@propco.co.uk>]

Hi Simon,

>> However, there is one part of the app that I do not want to rewrite. I
>> guess it's really the part of the "app" that is an app. It's uses SOAP
>> to communicate with a server on the LAN that handles reservations. It
>> checks for availability. Before my times, we outsourced the creation of
>> this app.

Does your website communicate with the application using SOAP? What is
the application written in?

It's not too difficult to bring data into Lenya from a webservice - at
our company we use this method a lot.

Regards



Vik



Simon Walter wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have inherited an extremely poorly managed website where everything
> was coded by hand using Struts and Tiles and no DB. Any change required
> open Eclipse and editing Tile, .vm, .properties, and all sorts of files.
> It would be quicker and neater to write raw HTML. Needless to say, I
> want to do away with all this hand written XML and whatnot and use
> something more robust and manageable - Lenya.
> 
> However, there is one part of the app that I do not want to rewrite. I
> guess it's really the part of the "app" that is an app. It's uses SOAP
> to communicate with a server on the LAN that handles reservations. It
> checks for availability. Before my times, we outsourced the creation of
> this app.
> 
> The main thing I would like is not have to resort to using an iframe or
> maintaining the layout (css, images, menus, etc) for two different
> websites and try to make them look like one.
> 
> Has anyone done anything like this before? If so, first of all, I'd like
> to know if it's possible. Then if I can't figure it out, I may come back
> and ask for help. Another thing I'd like to ask advice on is: how much
> should I expect to be charged by the company, that we outsourced the
> creation of this app to, for them to integrate it with Lenya. They seem
> to be rip off artists. So I want to know what is reasonable.
> 
> You can see the website here:
> http://www.htholidays.com/
> 
> The booking section is the part of the app I want to keep. Yes, it's a
> wreck. Which is why I'm trying to bring some order.
> 
> I've found a few hints in the archives about integrating Struts with
> Lenya, but nothing substantial.
> 
> Any help or advice is appreciated.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Simon
> 
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscribe@lenya.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: user-help@lenya.apache.org
> 


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Re: Struts and Tiles app moving to Lenya

[Simon Walter <si...@hokkaidotracks.com>]

Hi Andreas,

Thank you for your reply.

Andreas Hartmann wrote:
> what would the integration look like? Would the app just be embedded 
> into the Lenya-based website, or is there a relation between the data? 
> Passing information extracted from the Lenya content to the external 
> app (e.g., a hotel ID as request parameter) should be no problem, but 
> a deeper integration might require more work.
There is no relation with the data. So it would just be displaying the 
forms for booking/enquiring. However, there is some relation with css. 
Though I don't think that is what you are referring to by data relation.

> I'm confident that this will be possible. Lenya is based on Cocoon 
> which is a great framework for application integration. We integrated 
> several apps into Lenya websites in customer projects.
>
> There are several approaches for such an integration:
>
> * Server-side via simply including the output in the page (single pages)
> * Server-side, Lenya acts as a proxy (if the app has a page flow)
> * Server-side via a web service, pages generated by Lenya (SOAP/REST/…)
> * Client-side (JavaScript with AJAX/JSON)
> * …
Both one and two sound correct. However, one might not work as there are 
several successive forms: step1, step2, step3... like on a shopping cart 
system where you first enter the shipping details then the billing 
details. So maybe the proxy idea is good.

> I never heard the term "rip off artist" before. Is it the same as "con 
> artist"?

Kind of. Except that you actually deliver the goods but at a very high 
price. Usually the person being "ripped off" doesn't know it.

> I guess the app is only accessible by registered agents, or can we 
> take a look at it online? I didn't find a booking section on the 
> website, only the enquiry forms …
Right on the home page it says (albeit in an image :/) "ready to book?" 
This form and the following forms I would like to show on the Lenya 
site. Right now they get their styling from the site as they are 
deployed in the same war.

The first form gets your arrival date etc. Then next form presents you 
with available properties. You choose the property you want. Then you 
move on to either inquiring or booking. We seem to be getting a 500 
error after that. ...rip off artists... I guess we could recreate most 
of this in Lenya. Except for the bit that transmit data via SOAP. I will 
have to take a look at going down this path in the future, as it seems 
that I could treat the stripped down app as a CGI that accepts POST 
data. Are my assumptions correct? Would that be easier and more 
importantly quicker that trying to go with the Lenya as a proxy method? 
Or is this basically the same thing?

Andreas, thank you for your great feedback. I will talk to our 
outsourced developers and I will get in contact with some of the 
companies on that page. If "management" approves, maybe we'll outsource 
to someone else. Of course budgets are tight everywhere now. Which is 
one reason I find myself clean this mess up.


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Re: Struts and Tiles app moving to Lenya

[Andreas Hartmann <an...@apache.org>]

Hi Simon,

Simon Walter schrieb:
> I have inherited an extremely poorly managed website where everything 
> was coded by hand using Struts and Tiles and no DB. Any change required 
> open Eclipse and editing Tile, .vm, .properties, and all sorts of files. 
> It would be quicker and neater to write raw HTML. Needless to say, I 
> want to do away with all this hand written XML and whatnot and use 
> something more robust and manageable - Lenya.
> 
> However, there is one part of the app that I do not want to rewrite. I 
> guess it's really the part of the "app" that is an app. It's uses SOAP 
> to communicate with a server on the LAN that handles reservations. It 
> checks for availability. Before my times, we outsourced the creation of 
> this app.

what would the integration look like? Would the app just be embedded 
into the Lenya-based website, or is there a relation between the data? 
Passing information extracted from the Lenya content to the external app 
(e.g., a hotel ID as request parameter) should be no problem, but a 
deeper integration might require more work.

> The main thing I would like is not have to resort to using an iframe or 
> maintaining the layout (css, images, menus, etc) for two different 
> websites and try to make them look like one.
> 
> Has anyone done anything like this before? If so, first of all, I'd like 
> to know if it's possible.

I'm confident that this will be possible. Lenya is based on Cocoon which 
is a great framework for application integration. We integrated several 
apps into Lenya websites in customer projects.

There are several approaches for such an integration:

* Server-side via simply including the output in the page (single pages)
* Server-side, Lenya acts as a proxy (if the app has a page flow)
* Server-side via a web service, pages generated by Lenya (SOAP/REST/…)
* Client-side (JavaScript with AJAX/JSON)
* …

> Then if I can't figure it out, I may come back 
> and ask for help. Another thing I'd like to ask advice on is: how much 
> should I expect to be charged by the company, that we outsourced the 
> creation of this app to, for them to integrate it with Lenya. They seem 
> to be rip off artists. So I want to know what is reasonable.

I never heard the term "rip off artist" before. Is it the same as "con 
artist"?

Actually I'd recommend finding someone who is familiar with Lenya or at 
least Cocoon. There are several companies offering Lenya services (see 
e.g. [1]).

It's very hard to estimate the amount of work necessary for the 
integration without further information. Can you explain what the 
integration would look like?

> You can see the website here:
> http://www.htholidays.com/
> 
> The booking section is the part of the app I want to keep. Yes, it's a 
> wreck. Which is why I'm trying to bring some order.

I guess the app is only accessible by registered agents, or can we take 
a look at it online? I didn't find a booking section on the website, 
only the enquiry forms …

[1] 
http://www.opensourcexperts.com/Index/index_html/Apache%20Lenya/index.html

-- Andreas


-- 
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01


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