Re: [sdx-users] [newbie] Programmatic use of SDX...

[Pierrick Brihaye]

Hi,

Remi Vankeisbelck a écrit:

> I'm working in the French Scientifical and Technical Research Lab for 
Building and Construction

People here are mainly french speakers. Anyway...

> I'm currently investigating SDX as a "back-end" component for our 
> solutions. I've had a quick look at the "XSP" side of the framework,

Notice that is is a Cocoon feature : SDX *is* a Cocoon application.

> which is very interesting, but does not fulfill all our requirements.

Basically, it should : whatever you can do with Java is do-able with 
XSP/Cocoon or... should be.

> We'd like to embed the indexing feature and search engine into virtually 
> any Java application (e.g. web-started swing clients, applets, web
>apps). I'd just like to do be able to search into my XML docs using SDX
> classes, just like :
>
> // get hold of an sdx 'app'
> SDXApp myApp = ... ;
> // perform a search in this app...
> SDXResult[] results = myApp.search("my request here");
> :-)

That is a solution but, what prevents you to write "web-started swing 
clients, applets, web apps" that would send requests to a back-end SDX 
server ?

Let your app build a request, then let your app send it to SDX, then let 
SDX do the hard-work, then let your app process the response.

> This "code" could be executed in a local class

That could be a problem indeed : SDX is designed for HTTP transport. 
Well... localhost may do the trick but I guess that this is not what you 
want ?

If I'm right... we may continue this discussion :-)

> So, I tried to have a look at the javadocs and source code 
> (FrameworkImpl, etc), but as you may know this is very time-consuming 
> task...

I agree... So here is a rough outline of the architecture :

The Servlet engine provdes a Context
Cocoon provides a ComponentManager.
When Cocoon receives an HTTP request within the SDX context for the 
first time, its ComponentManager, "looks-up" for an SDX Framework ; it 
should normally get an implementation
The ComponentManager then triggers the different component life cycle 
events. Among them, there is a configuration step that uses 
configuration files that can be retrieved by the Context.

When the framework is ready, you can get access to it from Java. Cocoon 
automatically generates the code through a complex yet very  powerful 
mechanism (namely Sitemap/SDX logicsheets).

So, if you want to get rid of Cocoon, write your own app, give it a 
ComponentManager, and take inspiration from SDX logicsheets :-)

Cheers,

--
Pierrick Brihaye, informaticien
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