iiWAS 2004 Cross-Publishing Tutorial

1. Preliminaries

At iiWAS 2004 conference (International Conference on Information Integration, Web-Applications and Services) I held a tutorial with the title:

"Advanced Cross-Publishing with XML and XSL using Platform Independent Open Source Tools"

This tutorial contains three parts

1. Introduction to terms like cross/multichannel publishing and system integration, advantage of open source tools, open standards and formats.
2. Presentation of a set of open source tools and frameworks like: JEdit, Apache Ant, Xalan, Cocoon.
3. "Hands-on" Tutorial with examples.

Use the information provided here as is, in case of questions, please contact me.

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2. Presentation

The presentation (PDF) contains the introduction to open source/protocol, cross/multichannel publishing, as well as introduction to JEdit functionality, Apache Ant and Apache Cocoon basics.

• Presentation (pdf, 472k)

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3. Links

The following tools and frameworks have been used during the "hands-on" presentation:

• http://www.jedit.org
• http://www.eclipse.org
• http://www.mozilla.org
• http://java.sun.com (Java Virtual Machine)
• http://ant.apache.org
• http://jakarta.apache.org (Tomcat and other Proj.)
• http://xml.apache.org (Xerces, Xalan, FOP)
• http://cocoon.apache.org
• http://www.mysql.org (MySQL Database & JDBC driver)

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4. Hands-On Examples

The hands-on example contain:

• A simple XML to XML transformation using JEdit or Xalan directly
• An offline website generation using Apache Ant
• A set of Cocoon 2.1 examples including:
  • Simple XML to HTML transformation
  • Use of readers (image, CSS delivery)
  • PDF publishing
  • Using wildcard matcher
  • Database access (read)
  • Simple form handling
  • Enhanced generator functionality
  • Generation of RSS (Rich Site Syndication)
  • Example for "callback" templates for clean separation of HTML style information and XSL(T) logic

These zip file contains the JEdit and Ant Examples:

• JEdit (Xalan) XML to XML transformation example (zip, 14k)
• Apache Ant - offline website generation example (zip, 1,08MB)

The Cocoon example requires installed Cocoon 2.1, mySQL database, and a mySQL JDBC driver. Download the Cocoon examples and unzip them in the webapps/cocoon directory.

• Cocoon Examples (zip, 1,1MB)

For proper functionality of the database examples, a database "test" has to be created in mySQL and the following test data must be inserted:

• Periodic System - mySQL test-data

Follow the installation instructions in the Cocoon example sitemap. There is described in detail how a datasource has to be declared in Apache Cocoon.

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