WLS with Cocoon

Question

Has anyone tried using Apache's Cocoon for managing web publishing? I've
has a go with Xalan and Xerces, and been pleased with these to date. I've
now come across Apache's Cocoon, and would be interested to here the
opinions of anyone who has used it already.
Mark.

Answer 1

I also managed to get cocoon and weblogic 451 working without too much
difficulty.
However I have't been able to suss out the mechanism for passing a default
file to the cocoon servlet.
Anybody know what to do?
Humphrey Sheil <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
I got Cocoon 1.7.4 working with weblogic 5.1 very easily (apart from one
major issue which I'll detail and gripe about below ;-)).
I used the instructions posted on the Cocoon list by Philip Aston (which
I've included below) which worked but one change was required.
I got a problem (about 50% of the time) where weblogic would fail todeploy
my cocoon war and also complain about another process listening on ports
7001 / 7002 which simply wasn't true. Turns out that if weblogic isunable
to parse the web.xml that comes with cocoon, I had to replace it with an
example taken from the weblogic examples directory (with the relevant
information included). The way weblogic deals with this - cascading the
error in deploying to affect the port listening is not good.
Once I got this working, I hooked up security etc. in about 10 minutesusing
the servlet 2.2 form-based authentication and am generally very happy with
the weblogic-cocoon integration.
Here are the posted instructions and I'm also attaching my web.xml file asa
reference. I didn't have any problems getting XSP to work (although I'mnot
using it at all - just hitting the samples provided). Even given thepoints
Philip makes below about losing hot deploy abilities, your EJBs should
deploy fine with this turned off.
Regards,
Humphrey
Philip Aston wrote:
I've been playing with using Cocoon 1.7.4 in conjunction with BEA
WebLogic Server 5.1. (Stefano and folks, feel free to add any or all
of this to the installation guide. You might also like to add a
success report for MS NT 4.0 SP4, BEA WebLogic Server 5.1 SP3, JDK
1.2.2.)
WLS 5.1 implements Servlet 2.2. so it plugs in easily. Here's a quick
recipe:
- Add the xerces, xalan, fop, servlet, and cocoon JAR files (from the
distribution) to your CLASSPATH. (See below). If you're using Java
2, you should also add the tools.jar file from the JDK distribution
to your CLASSPATH.
- Create a new subdirectory tree of your WLS run time directory
"cocoonwar/WEB-INF" and copy the default web.xml file (from the
src directory of the distribution) there.
- Copy the cocoon.properties from the conf directory of the
distribution to cocoonwar/WEB-INF and updated the web.xml file to
refer to it.
- Copy the samples directory from the distribution to cocoonwar
- Map the web application into the WLS URI name space by adding the
following line to your weblogic.properties file:
weblogic.httpd.webApp.cocoon=cocoonwar
Start WLS, point your browser at
"http://localhost:7001/cocoon/samples/index.xml" and away you go.
Classpaths and XSP:
To support hot deployment of EJB's and Servlets, WebLogic Server
uses its own class loader with its own classpath (the "WebLogic
classpath"). Normally you'd put all the WebLogic Server container
code, JDBC drivers, etc. in your Java CLASSPATH (so that WebLogic
Server can start up) and add all your application code (stuff that
needs to be able to be redeployable) to the WebLogic classpath.
Cocoon is effectively "container" code, and the XSP processor uses
dynamic classloading which only understands the Java CLASSPATH, so
you should put all of the Cocoon jars in CLASSPATH.
The big problem with this is that you can't use any code that loads
from the WebLogic classpath within XSP's. This includes all of the
WebLogic API, so is a PITA. To overcome this, either the way Cocoon
loads classes needs to be modified (Stefano, is this easy?), or the
WebLogic Server class loader needs to be disabled (in which case you
have to be willing to live without hot redeployment).
To disable the WebLogic class loader, put your application classes,
the Cocoon jars and all of the WebLogic Server stuff into the Java
CLASSPATH add -Dweblogic.system.disableWeblogicClassPath=true to the
Java command at the end of you WebLogic start script.
- Phil
This is not an official BEA response. Please do not send me unrelated
WebLogic support questions - I am unable to answer them. Instead
please use the BEA developer newsgroups - see
http://developer.bea.com, or contact BEA support.
Philip Aston - Senior Consultant
BEA Professional Services (Northern Europe)
"Bob" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
I have been trying to get Cocoon working with WL. So far it has been a
lot
of trouble. I am mostly interested in getting XSP to work. The firstthing
you need to do is usethe -Dweblogic.system.disableWeblogicClassPath=true
command to turn off dynamic class loading. The problem I am now havingis
that some of my EJBs won't deploy.
If you don't want XSP Cocoon works well.
-Bob
Mark Bower <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Has anyone tried using Apache's Cocoon for managing web publishing?
I've
has a go with Xalan and Xerces, and been pleased with these to date.I've
now come across Apache's Cocoon, and would be interested to here the
opinions of anyone who has used it already.
Mark.