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/