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May 21, 2002

Cocoon Portal and REST Just

Cocoon Portal and REST


Just came accross this in Leighs last-week column on REST:



Apache Cocoon already offers a useful array of functionality in this space. The concept of a "sitemap" binds processing pipelines to HTTP requests, with the pipeline inputs being any mixture of static and dynamic resources. As the sitemap and pipeline definitions are themselves XML documents, one can imagine a suite of tools to allow point-and-click creation of services using Cocoon components.


The Cocoon portal already makes use of this and in fact the example services integrated are accessed using URIs. Moreover.com is the main provider we used to build the sample coplets. XML news in RSS format can be accessed from Moreover via a URI. Adding new external data is therefore as easy as defining the pipeline in the sitemap.


Like this:



<map:match pattern="sunspotdemocoplet-online-*.xml">

<map:generate src="http://p.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?index_{1}+xml"/>

<map:transform src="sunspotdemo/styles/coplet_MoreoverDotCom.xsl"/>

<map:serialize type=\"xml\"/>

</map:match>

 

Notice how the generator (map:generate) then goes "out" and fetches the news from moreover. The returned format is then formatted - using a stylesheet - into a simple HTML table for inclusion into the main portal pipeline. This is made easy because the news is returned in RSS - so we can use the same stylesheet for all the feeds. A presentation on the portal is here.

Posted by Matthew at May 21, 2002 02:26 PM

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