All,

As I read this:

    http://forrestbot.cocoondev.org/index.jsp

"This site contains automatically updated and built versions of websites
built with the latest Forrest. It aims to provide a service similar to Gump,
but for websites. Host projects' XML is automatically checked out and the
HTML rebuilt every 4 hours. "

I wondered if there is a way to collaborate. Gump is objectified in Python
now, and has a core engine that might be re-usable for Forrest-bot. Gump
checks code out of SCMs (CVS/SVN, for now) and orchestrates scripts or ant
runs, traps errors/timeouts, etc. This seems what forrest-bot needs to do
also, and I'd hate to under-utilise our investment when we could help you
avoid duplication.

A few thoughts occur:

1) Folks could update their site as part of their Gump build, but that seems
to be overloading the Gump process w/ clutter not meant there. That said,
there is nothing to stop us having a workspace/profile simple for this.

2) Nothing stops us from writing a simple ForrestBot flavour of Gump that
uses the standard workspace, but only "works on" projects with XML
attributes for forrest documentation. If would do it's normal checkout from
SCM, check if anything changed, build classpaths (if needed), launch
ant/script to do work. [I think the 'new' forrest-bot is Ant 1.6 based w/
includes, so maybe something could be done here.]

3) We could Gump the forrest base (build from scratch) and then the
documentation, so it is always the latest from CVS of all things.

There are lots of ways we could collaborate on this & save effort.

BTW: There are thoughts of writing a Gump web app  (Python) that could be
used to be interactive (please do X for me now). This isn't written yet, but
a Python webapp interface into these objects has to be a snap. If you don't
have something (and are building from scratch), maybe we could collaborate
there also.

That all said, I know that you guys (mainly Dave Brondsema, I hear) have
been working on a new form of Forrest-bot, and if this proposal is too
little, too late, oh well. Let me know your thoughts, and if you have any
interest exploring this.

Here is a pointer to the Python Gump:

http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-gump/python/gump

The Gump website will be updated to reflect Python Gump (once forrestbot
puts it there. :-)

http://jakarta.apache.org/gump

regards,

Adam
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