I'm debating an idea of using Sesame to create a website.  I don't like the idea of exposing the Sesame web server itself to the Internet.  However, I think one could use Sesame to create a static website based on database content.  The idea is to create a set of Sesame web pages which query the Sesame database.  Then I could feed the initial search page to a web crawler (such as HTTrack) which would crawl though the web pages generating a website.  This website could then be uploaded to a web server for exposure to the public.

I think this is feasible, but it is a bit cumbersome.  I'm wondering if anyone has tried anything similar, and if so, if there are any more reasonable ways to accomplish what I'm proposing.  Maybe I could to replace HTTrack with @HTTPGetHTML and @HTTPPostHTML, thus fully internalizing the process within Sesame.  My goal is to make this an easy process for the end user.

Hammer wrote on Mar 2^nd, 2008 at 1:34am:

I'm trying to avoid work, not create it!     I did get the full site generation to work using the Sesame web server and HTTrack.  The drawbacks were that I couldn't do XLookup "joins" in order to grab data from multiple databases, and I have to make minor adjustments prior to generation, such as replacing \ with / in the image file paths.  Your approach allows me to overcome these issues, but introduces complications.  Those include developing my own parser for the page templates (since I don't want to hard-code the templates), and managing image files on a network share instead of a private folder on the Sesame server, so that they can be copied to the resultant website.  I'm probably going to use your approach, since it has the highest level of flexibility, but I'm not looking forward to coding it.

We launched our website yesterday.  Completing that project showed me just how powerful Sesame can be.  I used a combination of tools to get the job done, including IrfanView for image resizing and SyncBack for uploading to the website.  But all of it is managed by the Sesame application, including the photo catalog, so it's all hidden from the user.  They have three buttons, Create, Preview, and Upload.

I still wish Sesame had a more complex query engine, particularly when it comes to reports, to allow one to query across multiple databases easily.  However, I've worked around that "shortfall", and am quite impressed with all the other functionality built into it.