If you just want to try out some handy XSLT extension modules for 4Suite's repository and skip all the blather, just scroll to the bottom of this item...
Akara is an extensible information gathering and presentation framework implemented in 4Suite.
As I describe it on the site:
In simple terms, you put notes into Akara (like a notepad). You put FAQ entries in (like a FAQ wizard). You put links and comments on those lings (like a Web log or bookmark manager). You put discussion logs in (like mailing list archives and instant messaging logs). You put code examples, articles, proposals, specifications, stories and reviews in (like a content manager). You put it all where it's convenient for the moment (like a Wiki). You can later on reorganize things relatively easily (like, ummm... like what?). You can see an example of Akara in action on my Akara site on XML processing in Python
I never really got it mature enough for release, in part because it's the project that finally left me gob-smacked with the sense that although 4Suite's core libraries are super-useful, the server framework is rather rickety and could do with a lot less wheel reinvention (I've discussed this matter with regard to my recent advocacy of CherryPy as a protocol server backbone for 4Suite after 1.0).
Anyways I'm rebuilding Akara to be a proof of concept of 4Suite repository/CherryPy integration. It's going slowly due to workload, and since many of the Akara XSLT extension modules are useful independently from Akara, I'm posting them here for now. They are:
- cachetool.py—an extension for caching results of common and slow XSLT templates. I use this heavily to cache the XML results of Versa queries in 4Suite. It stores and manages the caches as XML resources in the repository, with a given time-to-live. There is also a method to invalidate a cached value.
- calwidget.py—a widget that inserts an XHTML calendar into the XSLT output
- emailftext.py—a widget for reading UNIX mailboxes and using XSLT dispatch to process the items, and to send messages. Not vetted for security
- feedtools.py—an extension for RSS aggregation. Uses Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser to read a list of feeds given by URL and then write the result to the XSLT output as a consolidated RSS 1.0 feed. You probably want to use this together with cachetool.py so it's not retrieving feeds on every request.
- akaraftext.py—parses Akara markup (a wiki-like language) and inserts XHTML into the output stream