RE: Managing Java web apps using CMS (Ethan Michaels)

Hi Ethan, 

I spent several days struggling with this issue.  The easiest way around
it is to dismiss the idea of having any content at all in the ear or war
files you deploy - they should be pure functionality - all the content
and presentation will come from the cms.  That way you can also have a
site that previews HTML correctly in the cms (it just won't function).
Here are the steps I went through...

1. Build an 'empty' application with your build tool, i.e. strip out all
the HTML and JSP that will be supplied from your CMS.  

2. Deploy the empty application to your server.

3. Check where your app. Server unpacks the application to (not where
you drop the archive file), on Orion deploying ear files, this is
'[SERVER_ROOT]/applications/[APP_NAME]/[APP_NAME]/'.

4. Configure your CMS to deploy 'static' files to the unpacked root -
the server should automatically pick up any newly deployed HTML/JSP
files (unless you're using Tomcat in your production environment).  

5. Ensure the CMS can exclude named directories (i.e. META-INF and
WEB-INF) and configure it to do so - especially if you want the CMS to
delete old content.  

Doing things this way allows for a nice separation of your code from the
content produced by others.  In our case, this made sure our test team
didn't want or need to put every content deployment through formal
testing - something they insist on for every new version of a war/ear
file.  

Hope that helps,

Dan


Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 09:03:34 -0700
To: cms-list-/[email protected]
From: Ethan Michaels <[email protected]>
Subject: [cms-list] Managing Java web apps using CMS

At our shop we are using J2EE to build Web apps. For example, we have=20
signup forms for some of our various programs implemented as
servlet/JSP=20 applications. We will soon purchase a CMS. I am wondering
how those two=20 things are going to go together. A lot of you probably
know this already,=20 but with a J2EE application, what you do is
package the whole application=20 into a ".war" file (.war : "Web
archive") and place that into the annointed= =20 directory of your
application server (we're using JRun). Every part of the= =20 app is
inside this .war file =97 the program's servlets and other supporting=
=20 code in binary form (or the rough Java equivalent), and the JSP
files which= =20 are HTML pages with embedded Java code and tags. Page
headers and footers,= =20 nav bars, main content is all tied up inside
the .war file.

This mode of operation does not seem like it would work in a CMS=20
environment. From what I understand, a CMS stores all these page
elements=20 in a database and assembles them either at run time or in
advance. But you= =20 can't break a .war file apart and store the pieces
in a database and still= =20 have a working application.

I asked this question of a representative from Percussion about a year
ago= =20 and he said that we would keep our Web apps over here and our
static pages= =20 over there in the CMS and manage them separately.
(They may have a better=20 answer now. That was a while back.) However,
the Web apps are supposed to=20 share the appearance of the other pages
on the site. So if we use the CMS=20 to change the page headers we'll
have to go in to all our Web apps=20 individually and update the page
headers. And if we change the navigation=20 structure that's going to be
an even bigger hassle.

There are many Web apps and they are scattered throughout the site. So
what= =20 we really need is to manage their page elements at the same
time that we=20 manage the elements of our HTML pages.

Any insight or information about this issue would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,

Ethan

--
http://cms-list.org/
more signal, less noise.