[opencms-dev] Integration into (huge) legacy web-app

[Anders Bengtsson]

Christian Steinert wrote:

> It might be better to just keep your data in opencms, and to use your
> main application to get the needed information from opencms and assemble
> your pages. That would mean, though, that you could only use the Java
> APIs of OpenCms and not the JSP layer.

I guess this would be a fine solution, if there is a stable and
documented API to work against. If we have to tear the CMS into pieces
to do it, we won't be able to keep up-to-date with new versions of it.

Not dealing with a JSP layer is probably a good thing, the fewer
dependencies on servets, JSPs or anything, the easier it would be to
integrate into something else, even if that other system also is a web
system.

Right now we're re-starting our CMS evaluation, since none of the CMSes
we've looked at has had any good support for integrating into our app.
We're leaning towards just using a JSR-170/JCR-standard content
repository and putting the rest together ourselves.

> If your content is not very dynamic, you could use the static export
> feature of opencms which writes generated content into the file system
> whenever changes are published. This exported content could be taken
> from the filesystem and pieced together by another application.

We're so dynamic we're even looking at how we can add variables to our
content that can be evaluated at request-time...

/Anders