rivetweb/README at main · mxmanghi/rivetweb · GitHub

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                        Rivetweb README
                        ---------------

 Rivetweb is a minimum requirements Tcl based engine for creating template
based web sites. The only mandatory software you need is the Apache HTTP
Webserver, Apache Rivet and a few of the most popular Tcl related
packages (tdom, Itcl).

 Rivetweb relies on Apache Rivet (http://tcl.apache.org/rivet/) for doing
most of the work needed to create and manipulate content to be displayed in
HTML pages. Rivetweb exploits the ability of Rivet of handling
templates, therefore page have a consistent appearance thorough the
whole website.

 Rivetweb internal machinery and organizazion is entirely developed in
Tcl and Itcl, though the latter will be phased out in favor of TclOO.
Rivetweb was written with an emphasis on indipendence from actual
implementation of its components and it's a customizable,
extensible yet easy-to-use framework for simple websites: sometimes
'less is more'.

 The idea behind the simple design of Rivetweb is an easy to understand
pattern of cooperating classes whose inheritance tree is very short and
easy to explore

 The 2 key components in Rivetweb are datasources, objects responsible
to provide a model for the application data and 'page' objects, that
are views of the data and are responsible for the final representation of them

 Current code provides 3 basic datasource examples:
 - XMLBase: a datasource dealing with XML documents bearing both metadata and
contents of a page.
 - Scripted: a largely suboptimal datasource whose aim is to provide
an example of a component capable of running site specific scripts.
 - RWDummy: a dummy datasource whose main role is to create pages for
error messages and provide some introspectio

 Even though they are provided as examples from which new datasources could
be implemented you may create a simple web site just using or subclassing
these datasources

 Like in every template based framework Rivetweb can be running different
XHTML/CSS templates at once. You can switch between templates by customizing
the website specific configuration.

 Rivetweb is thought to be multilingual. The internal machinery is designed
to handle dictionaries of text instead of simple strings, therefore you can
have the same website running with different languages.

 Rivetweb works gently in conjunction with Apache's mod_rewrite
module. References to internal resources can automatically switch between
2 representations of the URIs: a representation with
explicit query arguments and a uniform representation without query
arguments. In this way Rivetweb was used to generate pure static
representations of a web site

Rivetweb has a basic support for extensibility of the markup:
page creation can be customized adding 'hook' procedures to the code,
thus adding new data transformations and/or tag expansion.

Rivetweb is entirely free and released under the Apache 2.0 licence.

# 2016-06-09