Webcenter sites integration with ATG

Question

I have question on Webcenter sites and ATG integration. 
We have to use webcenter sites as Web content management system that will feed the static content(text, images, videos, and other documents) to ATG. ATG will be acting as front end and host webpages. We have below two possibilities that we can think of
From Webcenter site we will use its APIs and expose web-services that ATG can consume to get the static contents. (requires lot of effort)
Webcenter site will publish content on the file system that ATG can link to and show them in a webpages. (relatively less effort)
Second solution looked good but there is no documentation that says it is possible. Only one document ‘cip_11gr1_for_file_systems_and_ms_sharepoint_administrator_guide.pdf’ explains
the pulling the data from file-system but it does not mention publishing to file-system.
Another document (webcenter_sites_11gr1_bp1_admin.pdf) that explains publishing to hard disk is template based publishing meaning, we will have to create templates which not a not intended way. since we don't want to create template just to publish.
My question is – is it possible that webcenter sites can to publish to file-system? If yes is there any document which can help us achieving that?
Will appreciate if you can suggest any other approach for integrating these two product.
Thanks
Sameer

Answer 1

Hi Sameer -
OOTB you can publish assets directly to disk using Export to XML, but you realize that by doing that, you're essentially using Sites as a very expensive GUI over a database.  By using a combination of Java classes and JSPs you can create very rich markup (or XML, or JSON, or whatever you like) and render that, then export that data to disk.  That way you can traverse asset relationships and write much more complex data to disk for consumption by external systems.
As for your options of #1 vs #2, you need to think carefully about what your goals are for using Sites and for using ATG.  There are a number of other integration options between Sites and ATG, including the reverse of #1, which is to have Sites render most pages and then consume data from ATG in service form.  There is also the efficient and decoupled approach of standing up ATG and Sites side-by-side and selectively integrating components together.  So Sites would drive marketing content and ATG would drive commerce content, and the two would leverage service APIs between the two when needed (for example, to render an ATG promo in Sites, or to render a detailed product description from Sites in ATG).
Each approach has pros and cons and there is no Correct Way To Integrate ATG and Sites, but there are, as you can see, several common patterns.
Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Tony Field
Function1