[OT] DOC output question (was [OT] RE: [oclug]MS Access clone)

[Rod Giffin]

On Tue, 2003-01-21 at 11:46, Ian Wormsbecker wrote:
> On January 21, 2003 11:44 am, Rod Giffin wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-01-21 at 11:16, Strosberg, Bill wrote:
> > However, I wonder if you've ever looked at the stuff coming out of
> > xml.apache.org.  Specifically there is a tool there that may have the
> >
> > I finally found a place on OCLUG to plug my favorite technologies.
> 
> I have had a brief look at alot of this stuff, but I never did manage to put 
> it all together. It seems there is alot of interesting stuff. JBoss, Jakarta, 
> Struts, Cocoon, etc.. etc..  It seems the list goes on and on :)

Yes, it does look intimidating at first.  We call it the "incessant
march".  Really though, those are mostly API's rather than new
technologies... helpers in order to do things.  For the most part, you
decide what components you need for your purpose, download the jar or
war files and install them in whatever J2EE server you're using by
following the instructions for deploying jar or war files that comes
with your server.  Most of the time it's drag and drop.

Part of this is a sandbox which means there is a song and dance to go
through in order to figure out how some of the major components work
(notably Cocoon on the XML side, and JetSpeed on the Jakarta side). 
This is mostly because these are sort of wrappers for a lot of the other
technologies.  

Cocoon has a fine book called Cocoon Developers Handbook though,
available at Chapters and other fine bookstores.  It covers pretty much
all of the bases.

> I would love to see an OCLUG talk about this some day. I would explore it 
> myself, but unfortunately don't have the time. A talk at OCLUG may give many 
> people enough of an intro to start looking at some of these projects.

I've volunteered for this, and Vic has asked me to give a talk about it,
but I had a major bout with pneumonia that lasted almost 2 months, and
couldn't make a commitment.  I'm actually still recovering.  Not sure
how fast I'm improving, it causes my voice to hurt a bit.  Maybe in a
month or two?

By the way Bill,

Cocoon now comes with FOP already installed in its lib directory.  All
you really have to know is how to define an XSL stylesheet for whatever
format you want, and how to generate XML from your datasource.  Both
should be fairly trivial.

Rod.