HCMC Blogs

Reviewed two more. Getting through them steadily.

on late duty.

Nothing urgent arising out of this meeting; the main focus was the hardware and software requirements for the workshops, which MT is working on.

I've made the following changes to RVDB's Ant script:

• Inside the build directory (where the root build.xml is located), created a fop subdirectory, and inside that, a jars_replaced directory, where I'm going to store Cocoon jars that have been superceded by newer versions from FOP.
• Created a fop-jars.xsl file inside the fop directory, to process and update Cocoon's jars.xml file (modelled on exist-jars.xsl, which does the same thing).
• Created a new target in the Ant file:

  <target description="Replace FOP 0.95 with FOP 1.0" name="upgrade_fop">
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        <echo message="Upgrading FOP from 0.95 to 1.0             "/>
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
  
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        <echo message="Patching jars.xml            "/>
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        
        <xslt-saxon in="${cocoon.home}/lib/jars.xml" style="fop/fop-jars.xsl" out="${cocoon.home}/lib/jars.xml.patched">
        </xslt-saxon>
        <move file="${cocoon.home}/lib/jars.xml.patched" tofile="${cocoon.home}/lib/jars.xml"/>
        
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        <echo message="Removing jars to be replaced        "/>
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        
        <move failonerror="false" file="${cocoon.home}/lib/optional/batik-all-1.6.jar" tofile="fop/jars_replaced/optional/batik-all-1.6.jar"/>
        <move failonerror="false" file="${cocoon.home}/lib/optional/fop-0.95.jar" tofile="fop/jars_replaced/optional/fop-0.95.jar"/>
        <move failonerror="false" file="${cocoon.home}/lib/optional/xmlgraphics-commons-1.3.1.jar" tofile="fop/jars_replaced/optional/xmlgraphics-commons-1.3.1.jar"/>
        
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        <echo message="Adding replacement jars and new required jars        "/>
        <echo message="-----------------------------------------------"/>
        
        <copy todir="${cocoon.home}/lib/optional" overwrite="true">     
          <fileset dir="${fop.home}/lib">
            <include name="batik-all-1.7.jar"/>
            <include name="xmlgraphics-commons-1.4.jar"/>
            <include name="serializer-2.7.0.jar"/>
          </fileset>
        </copy>
        
        <copy todir="${cocoon.home}/lib/optional" overwrite="true">     
          <fileset dir="${fop.home}/build">
            <include name="fop.jar"/>
          </fileset>
        </copy>
        
        <copy todir="${cocoon.home}/lib/endorsed" overwrite="true">     
          <fileset dir="${fop.home}/lib">
            <include name="xml-apis-ext-1.3.04.jar"/>
          </fileset>
        </copy>
        
      </target>

• Added that target to the main "prepare" target:

  <target description="Prepare the cocoon and eXist directories"
        name="prepare" depends="update_exist, copy_exist, prepare_cocoon, upgrade_fop, build_cocoon, copy_additional_jars, patch_cocoon">
      </target>
  

• Ran a build, which seemed to work fine, and confirmed that Cocoon and the eXist Webstart client still work. They do.

What I don't know yet is whether anything else works properly. This is what I'll have to do next:

• Check through the sitemap changes made in RVDB's transformations, and alter anything that doesn't match our existing projects. For instance, he changes the XHTML doctype to transitional; that's something we definitely don't want. There may also be changes in our original transformation missing from RVDB's.
• Identify, or create, a simple project that can be used to test all the functionality. The natural candidate is the IALLT Journal project, which is quite small, and uses FOP. However, it's not simple. It might be worth simply creating something straightforward for easier testing of future builds. We want to confirm that XQuery Generators, Saxon XSLT transformations, and FOP transformations all work.
• Test character encoding issues. This is particularly needed because of this comment at the head of patch_web_xml.xsl:

  <!-- change default encodings to UTF-8 -->
  <!-- except for servlet[servlet-name='cocoon']/init-param/param-name[. = 'container-encoding']:
    should stay ISO-8859-1, see 
    	-http://markmail.org/message/nm6bnvqztbee4s5o
    	-http://markmail.org/message/jt256gl3magir6g4
    	-http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/RequestParameterEncoding#A3._Decoding_incoming_requests:_Servlet_Container
  -->  
  

  We had form submission working fine with both GET and POST, using all-UTF-8 settings; if possible, I'd prefer this, but it may be that something has changed in Cocoon 2.1.12x which screws this up.

I discovered that the problem I was having with RVDB's Ant script, which I've modified, was actually with Saxon 9.3, which for some reason was failing to do transformations properly. I've rolled back to Saxon 9.2, and now the build goes OK and the resulting webapp works fine. Next I need to integrate the FOP instructions into the Ant build.

Went through two more PDSA applications.

Four new student pictures thumbnailed and included on the abroad part of the site, on DR's instructions.

Leaving early -- got to keep those G&T hours under control...

Added some more detailed comments to db_fields.php, as part of the long process to document this stuff properly for Doxygen.

Created a logo image (which may change, of course), and an About box class based on QDialog which retrieves application title and version information from the auto-generated version.h file, and displays it.