Folks,
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- [ ] No downloading of blocks from repositories
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Because of some discussions at Gent I think there are some people more having a wrong impression of what the Cocoon Block deployer (CBD) does. Expressed in simple terms it is a library that extracts the content of a COB file into the blocks directory of a Cocoon installation. BTW, Commons transaction, which provides filesystem transactions, works in my first tests really well!
As it is only a library, a client is needed that uses it. I want to provide an Ant task that can install a bunch of COBs. But in the future having something like a Eclipse wizard would be nice. For now the library is only used in unit tests.
Beside installing a COB file, the CBD is able to access COB libraries. For the time being I only support the file system but integrating something like a web service providing blocks should be very straight forward (only a new locator implementation within the CBD library is necessary). Anybody volunteering writing a Cocoon application that provides blocks via web services? (This should be very easy!!!)
Finally I want to say what the CBD is NOT:
- It's not an implementation of "real blocks". It's only about their installation.
- There is no direct interface between the block machinery in Cocoon and its deployment. If Cocoon finds a new block installed (extracted) in the block directory it uses it. So I was able to start with the CBD because it should work with any block solution we agree on. How the block.xml and wiring.xml finally look like, isn't important ATM.
-- Reinhard
