Intoduction

Paloose is a PHP5 version of the Cocoon Web engine written in PHP. The Cocoon system allows separation of content and style so that designers can concentrate on each part separately, something that was always difficult to do with HTML, although that situation has improved. In general the content is stored as XML (although not exclusively) which is then transformed (via XSL) into a form that can be displayed on a client browser. By changing the transformations a variety of outputs can be supported (different browsers, RSS feeds etc.), all from the same content. The key to controlling this process is a sitemap which contains the instructions of how each incoming request is handled.

Each sitemap consists of a series of pipelines that enclose a set of components in exactly the same form as Cocoon. These components provide the basic mechanism of reading (generating), transforming and outputting (serializing) data. See the components' description for more details of sitemaps. Although it is not essential, a knowledge of Cocoon is useful.

Paloose can work in two ways: as a server or as a client.

Paloose Server

The Paloose server is designed as a "standalone" system which works with the Apache server. The term server here when applied to Paloose is a little loose since it could be said that it is acting a client to Apache; much as Cocoon is built on the Tomcat server. However it is relatively safe to consider it as a server to distinguish it from the client system.

When used as a server the requests that are received by Apache are forwarded directly to the Paloose system by Apache using the .htaccess file. The flow of control is shown here:

Paloose Client

It is possible to use Paloose as a client to such Web applications/servers as WordPress. The process requires making a suitable interface to the server and instructing Paloose to act as a client. For example in WordPress there is a suitable plugin that provides this interface, together with the administration page to change the Paloose environment (although this is not normally necessary). The overall flow is:

For more details on Plugins for Paloose see here