Re: development status

Stou Sandalski wrote, On 07/07/2003 6.32:

> Hi, 
>  
> I've been looking at the Alexandria site for a while, checking every
> week or so. with the hope that the project has went into active
> development. but since it hasn't changed, I thought I could lend a hand
> to get this thing working. 

Good! :-)

> I have a few years of experience with servlets (nothing production
> level), and recently started developing JSP apps for my job (at the
> university I attend). I have classes and work, so I am not sure how much
> time I can invest in this, but I should be able to put in a couple of
> hours every few days at least. 

:-)

> My primary interest is in developing a CVS repository browser using
> java, I use a PHP based one (horde-chora) which doesn't have all the
> capabilities I want, and a python one (viewcvs+cvsgraph) which seems a
> bit archaic to me.so I would prefer to have something more 'modern'.
> If I understand correctly Alexandria is supposed to provide such a
> capability.and I would like to help build it.  I understand that
> Alexandria generates mostly static html pages, so maybe there isn't
> anything for me to do, but if there is. please let me know. or maybe
> point me in a different direction.

Well, the goal of Alexandria is to generate documentation about a 
project. ATM it is made to work to generate the docs offline, and here 
is an example: 
http://cvs.apache.org/~nicolaken/whiteboard/alexandria-docs/xml-cocoon/

But this is not optimal it seems, as the size of the generated docs is 
very big, and I doubt that generating all this stuff statically for big 
projects is going to be the answer.

So yes, I'm very interested in seeing it go to a server-based solution, 
with the possibility of still generating the offline docs for who wanbts 
them.

There is an Apache project called Cocoon http://cocoon.apache.org/ that 
can be very nice for this, as it also powers Forrest 
http://xml.apache.org/forrest/, so that Alexandria and Forrest could 
integrate visually and in linking.

What I would propose you to do now, is to hash out a document that 
describes the functionality that you0d like to see in this server-based 
version of Alexandria, and see how the current static functionality can 
be accounted for.

Thanks :-)

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   [email protected]
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
---------------------------------------------------------------------