Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based upon Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images and other resources. Forrest uses these to render the source content into a website via command-line, robot, or dynamic application.
With a downloaded distribution, Forrest is already built. Just set the environment variables for convenience: FORREST_HOME to point to src/core and add FORREST_HOME/bin to your PATH. That is it, ready.
The source code is also provided, so you can alter it or extend it, and then re-build by doing 'build.bat' (Windows) or './build.sh' (Unix). If you need more instructions, then see the Building Forrest document.
Forrest is ready to go! Here are some things to try ...
Simply type 'forrest' in this top-level directory. This will render the HTML and PDFs for the Forrest documentation into the build/site/ directory. Point your web browser to the index.html file.
Type 'forrest run' in this top-level directory. You can then point your browser to http://localhost:8888/ and view the Forrest website generated dynamically.
Create a new (empty) directory in your home space, cd to it, and type 'forrest seed' which will generate a skeleton directory structure and template XML. If you like, edit the XML in the src/documentation/content/xdocs/ directory. Now type 'forrest' to render your new site, or 'forrest run' to generate a webapp then experiment with editing docs in src/documentation/content/xdocs/ and watch them be instantly rendered.
Type 'forrest -projecthelp' to list the available Forrest commands. NOTE: use the 'forrest.bat' version when running under Cygwin!
Your distribution has a copy of the Apache Forrest core documentation. Refer to the online or SVN version for the up-to-date documentation.
For further information please read our Getting Started guide. If you have any questions or suggestions, please subscribe to the Forrest mailing lists.
Thanks for using Apache Forrest!
Copyright 2002-2004 Apache Software Foundation. All rights reserved.