rapple - website generation tool.

rapple [-chvVx] [-f configfile] [-H host] [-d srcdir] [-o webdir]

Rapple is a lightweight XML based tool that permits web authors to produce standards based web content of a consistent and high quality. It is based on the premise that the use of plain XHTML sources along with XSLT for styling makes for good websites.

Rapple converts HTML sources into XHTML, an XML variant of HTML, and then transforms these using an XSLT stylesheet to produce the final website. the advantage to generating a website in this manner is that it exhibits a high degree of consistency by conforming to established web standards (as defined by bodies such as the W3C). As a bonus the transformation to XHTML makes content amenable to additional parsing services (e.g., link checking, creation of digests and generation of feeds etc.) Rapple processes CSS files and binary resources (e.g., images, PDF documents etc.) by simply copying them to the appropriate location in the generated website.

Central to rapple is the notion of separation of content from presentation. Content is what the website author writes (using a text editor, word processor etc.) and concerns purely the message that is to be conveyed. Presentation concerns layout (e.g., headers, footers, logos etc.) and style (colours, fonts etc.) and is covered by a site XSLT and perhaps CSS stylesheets. The website author is therefore responsible for maintaining his/her HTML sources (usually in a directory tree that represents the website) along with an XSLT and perhaps a CSS.

Rapple needs to know where the site sources are and where the final website is to be built (these can be specified either as command line options or in a configuration file). During processing rapple also creates a datastore that it uses to store by-products (these can sometimes be useful for tracking down problems with the original sources.) Each time changes are made to the original sources (or to the site XSLT/CSS) the website (and datastore) should be re-generated. Rapple supports the iterative process of applying changes, regenerating and testing a website by implementing the necessary infrastructure, processing the site and logging issues. Once testing is complete a production website may be generated and deployed.

In addition to simply applying a house style to source files rapple also performs other functions. For example rapple has a feature called "indexing" where it can read the contents of a directory and generate an index file from extracts of each of the source files it finds in the directory. Rapple can also perform other interesting tasks such as context highlighting, storage of meta data in a MySQL table and checking links of completed websites. See the website for details on how to configure rapple to use these features (http://rapple.sourceforge.net/)

-c

performs a configuration check (can be used in conjunction with the -f option).

-d

specify an alternative sources dir (defaults to config file settings)

-f

specifies alternate configuration file

-h

displays help information

-H

specify an alternative host (domain)

-o

specify an alternative output dir (defaults to config file settings)

-v

show version information

-V

show verbose version information

-x

delete datastore contents

Rapple looks for control information in a configuration file and searchs for it in the following order: (1) the file specified by the -f option on the command line; (2) the file specified by the value of the RAPPLE_CONF environment variables; and (3) a file called rapple.conf in the current working directory. Once located rapple reads the information in the configuration file and uses it to locate necessary directories and processing information. As a general rule it is a good idea to maintain a separate rapple configuration for each website that you are building.

Contact: a_j_moran@users.sourceforge.net