Using Kettle in other contexts then Engage

[Michelle]

Hi Steve,

I'm glad that this will be useful for you. :)

Engage 0.1 is really a proof of concept - 0.3 will be much more fleshed out and useful. In 0.3 we will have a README and other support documentation. For now you could look at our nightly build of engage: http://build.fluidproject.org:8095/engage/demo/index.html

If you wanted to build engage yourself you actually need to use ant. Simply run the default ant target in the kettle build-scripts directory inside fluid-all. The result will be a products directory containing two WAR files - one is minified while the other isn't. The WAR will work dropped into tomcat or jetty.

I think the use of Kettle in Decapod and for other Fluid things will start to grow the library you mention. It will be good to continue this conversation as Kettle becomes self standing and is fleshed out more. I would say, using the terminology of our component status, that Kettle is really 'Sneak Peek' right now. It's interesting and folks that want to polk around in it definitely should but API will change and solidify over time. We also have a plan to move Kettle to V8 so I would think Kettle won't come out of sneak peek until that transition happens.

I think I'm going to leave the renderer question to Antranig or Colin. We certainly are planning a simpler face on the renderer but I'm not sure that real time tree generation has been on the table yet. Certainly interesting.

Michelle



On 2009-12-01, at 3:46 PM, Steven Githens wrote:

> Hi Michelle,
> 
> This is great and needed stuff.  In the meantime, is there a wiki page or README that details how to start up a current engage demo/project?  I've been trying to figure it out in some bits of free time I've had in the last week, but haven't gotten a working war file yet.  I've checked out fluid-all and was trying to build a random combination of maven targets.
> 
> Also, this may fit in below, but it would be good to have a library that comes out of this as well for use in existing applications that will various combinations of (template | component tree | rhino script ) and produce the output.  So if you're in a situation where you aren't nesessaryily using a kettle servlet/full framework, you can still get your stuff.  This would be great since fluid is being used in a number of projects.  And I like the idea of still being able to serve normal webpages with my fluid templates in addition to dynamic stuff... but in an existing project. 
> This might end up just being the same small library that contains the entire kettle|servlet framework and you could just use it in another application as well.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve
> 
> P.S. Complete tangent, but has anyone brainstormed about rendering output when you don't have a finished component tree, and may never have one. With support for Comet and other mass-port streaming connection type things in Java6+ (or some version), it would be interesting if there was a component type, like for a branch component which could take a sort of generator function and it would just continue streaming output until that function ended and moved on.
> 



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Michelle D'Souza
Software Developer, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre
University of Toronto