Lenya Tutorial

ApacheCon 2005

Stuttgart, Germany

Monday, July 18th, 2005

Agenda

• We‘ve got 180 minutes or three hours

• Coffe break 11:15-11:30

• I will split the tutorial into three parts– Part I: Introduction– Part II: Practical Demonstration– Part III: Backgrounds and insights

• We will have some time for discussion after each part

Part I

Introduction

Bio

• IT consultant with more than 15 years in the industry, worked (among others) with– General Electric (GE)– CSC PLOENZKE– T-Systems– T-Mobile– Ford Motor Company

• Interim CEO for Kabul based PAIWSTOON Networking Services Ltd. (part time)

• Lenya committer since October 2004• E-Mail: tschlabach@apache.org

(Please post your support questions to the mailing lists!)

Why I believe in Lenya

• Because it is Cocoon based• Cocoon is

– feature-rich– innovative– developed and maintained by a very healthy

community– well accepted in the corporate world

• Vodafone live!• T-Mobile „Rechnung Online“• and many more …

Why I believe in Lenya (cont.)

• Because it tries to avoid lock-in of content

Lenya‘s History

• Started by Michael Wechner at the University of Zurich

• Michael co-founded a company called Wayona headquartered in Switzerland to further develop Lenya– Used for the interactive edition of Neue Züricher

Zeitung (www.nzz.ch)• Donated to Apache Software Foundation Spring

2003• Successfully incubated and became a top level

project in September 2004

Lenya Versions

• < 1.2: historical, pre-Apache

• 1.2 Track– Current version: 1.2.4

• 1.4 Track– Still under development – no release yet

• Will it be easy to migrate from 1.2 to 1.4?– Unfortunately; not really

Major differences

• 1.2.x– in production for a lot

of sites– usecases are sitemap

based

• 1.4.– not (yet) as mature as

1.2– redesigned usecase

framework based on Cocoon Flow and Java

– Introduces the lenya:-Protocol

What does it take to use Lenya?

• Technical requirements:– JDK 1.4.x– A servlet container of your choice– The right versions of XML parsers and XSLT

transformers Xerces and Xalan– If applicable, double-check with your hosting

provider!

What does it take to use Lenya?

• Skill- and Mindset– Understanding of how OSS works

• Make sure your managers / customers understand this as well!

– Believe in J2EE, XML, XHTML, and any X…ML stuff

– Good knowledge of Cocoon

Features

• Multi-Lingual UI

• Multi-Lingual Websites

• 100% UFT-8 based (Unicode)

• Access Control

• Revision control (homegrown for now)

• Static HTML export

Room for improvement

• Well defined editor API

• Improved access control

• Java Content Repository (JSR 168) … still, but keep watching

Is Lenya fool-proof?

Part II

Practical Demonstration

Let‘s see it in action

Deployment (technical)

Deployment (organisational)

• Roles– System administrator

• understands Java Servlet containers• should have some Cocoon knowledge• installs the software

– Web designer• understands XSLT and CSS• creates the skeleton for the website

– Content editor• does not need any particular skills

Part III:

Backgrounds and insights

The „Default“ publication

• Understanding the sitemap

Document / Ressource Types

• Render any XML format to XHTML

Adding Cocoon features

• CForms

• Cocoon Flowscript

• …

The Blog publication

• Understanding the differences to the „Default“ publication

Closing remarks

Where Lenya needs improvement

• Documentation– Developer‘s documentation– End-User documentation

• Well done „User‘s Guide“

• Completeness of the GUI

• Editors

• Repository Integration

How can I help out?

• Download and start using Lenya

• Get your arms around it

• Contribute to the Wiki

• Contribute patches and enhancements– Start with tactical contributions

• Apache is a meritocracy:– You might be rewarded with an email address

@apache.org sooner or later

More sessions on Lenya

• Thursday, 17:30:Powering High-volume web sites with Lenya/Cocoon and mod_cache

Links

• http://lenya.apache.org/

• http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/

• http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000622.html