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sitemap deployed

I’ve deployed my web site map. This is the result of the work discussed in my post on Using Wt (C++ Web Toolkit) for a web site map. The original application mentioned in that post can now run as a WidgetSet application, and is now embedded in my php page wrappers.

I’m starting to think that it’d be nice to play with replacing my search page with a Wt application. Not because there’s anything wrong with the existing search, but because I’d like to free myself from maintaining the javascript. The javascript for my search page isn’t large nor terrible since I’m using jQuery, but replacing it with Wt would permit graceful degradation. And while javascript is handy, I’m still a non-expert in it.

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Using Wt (C++ Web Toolkit) for a web site map

It had been many years since I had looked at Wt, a C++ library for developing interactive web applications. Last weekend, I started using it again for a simple site map that’s automatically generated so I don’t have to manually update the map.

The first pass resulted in sitemap. I’m using a TreeView with Wt::WStandardItem objects.

The sitemap application initially generated the TreeView on the fly by traversing the filesystem under my document root, using my existing SiteIndexConfig class (used by my menu generators and my site indexer) for configuration. I knew from the start that this wouldn’t work for deployment, since it’d be too slow with all of the content from my old web server. But I already had classes to traverse the filesystem and pluck out web pages, find their titles (already stored in Xapian by my indexer), etc. It worked for a throwaway prototype.

I then wrote a new application to generate the data for sitemap, which I named (with no originality) mksitemap. It dumps a small binary file from a class named Dwm::WWW:DirectoryTree (derived from Dwm::DirectoryEntry), which can be directly read to populate a Dwm::WWW::SiteMap::DirectoryTree. From the instance of Dwm::WWW::SiteMap::DirectoryTree, I directly create Wt::WStandardItem objects for the Wt::TreeView.

The sitemap application itself is fairly small in terms of lines-of-code:


dwm@www2:/home/dwm/src/dwm/www/apps/sitemap% mcloc .
54 ./DwmWWWSiteMapApp.cc
22 ./DwmWWWSiteMapApp.hh
43 ./DwmWWWSiteMapDirectoryTree.cc
28 ./DwmWWWSiteMapDirectoryTree.hh
20 ./sitemap.cc
167 TOTAL

Obviously this isn’t counting the more general-purpose classes used by sitemap:


dwm@www2:/home/dwm/src/dwm/www/classes% mcloc src include
14 include/DwmWWW.hh
27 include/DwmWWWDirectoryTree.hh
41 include/DwmWWWSiteIndexConfig.hh
17 include/DwmWWWUtils.hh
97 src/DwmWWWDirectoryTree.cc
243 src/DwmWWWSiteIndexConfig.ll
130 src/DwmWWWUtils.cc
569 TOTAL

I’m not going to count the lines of code from libDwm; it’s a significant library, I’m only using a small part of it in this application, and it’s no effort to use it since I’ve been working on it for a decade. I’m using the Dwm::IO templates, the Dwm::SysLogger class, the Dwm::StringUtils templates, the Dwm::DirectoryEntry class and the Dwm::Signal class since I’m running under mod_fastcgi.