Re: [docbook-apps] Dynamic web serving of large Docbook

[Sean Wheller <sean@enbaya.co.za>]

On Thursday 30 September 2004 23:06, Frans Englich wrote:
> The sources stretches over several books and over 500 pages, and multiple
> authors are working and updating on a daily basis. It's maintained in a CVS
> repository, and the document's primary usage is on a website which
> occasionally should handle traffic corresponding to a slashdotting without
> requiring manual intervention(switch to serving true static files, for
> example). The output would be with the navigation structure(chunked), and
> PDF files for each chunk.

I have been looking at Apache Forrest [http://forrest.apache.org] to do a 
similar thing. However, my source XML is in SVN and I don't need to chunk 
since the forrest menu provides nested links to parts of the document. I have 
chosen to nest to sect3 only. The PDF is of the whole book something users 
seem to want. I don't mind as it saves on overhead and space on disk and the 
backup.

> One solution is to do an ordinary transformation, run by a cron/makefile
> script. But this is inflexible, since other content needs dynamic
> generation, and it also -- actually -- becomes a performance issue since it
> involves many files(largely because it's chunked PDF too); especially since
> the script would have to be run with short intervals in order to avoid long
> waits between commit/result.

Forrest can be run in two modes: static or webapp.

The webapp implements a website staging application. 

Another app is forrest-bot 
"Forrestbot lets you automate building & deploying websites. There are 
implementations to get source from various locations, build it, then deploy 
it somewhere. It can notify you afterwards, and it keeps a log of the build 
process. Each workstage has multiple implementations; you can use one or more 
of each."

>
> However, AFAICT, Docbook makes it not easy:
>
> * If one section is to be transformed, the sheets must parse /all/ sources,
> in order to resolve references and so forth. There's no way to workaround
> this, right?

You can preprocess so that all references are resolved. That way the XML 
cocoon sees does not need to resolve only transform.

> Is there any way to generate parts from a Docbook Set in a quick way,
> suitable for dynamic web serving?

Not in a single step.

-- 
Sean Wheller
sean@enbaya.co.za
http://www.enbaya.co.za