Embedding DITA Open Toolkit in a php based application

Question

We are looking to integrate DITA in our web application, which in an E- Learning platform. The DITA Open Toolkit processes all files using java. Wee are looking for a solution that allows us to work with the DITA content on the fly from a php - based application.

Does anyone know of any php projects that are written to work with DITA maps and content?

After searching we came across XMLmind DITA Converter (DITAC) and

Designed to be easily embedded in any JavaTM, desktop or server-side, application.

is one of its features. But in the documentation, only how to embed in java application is described.

Can anyone provide any help to sort it out. I dont have any idea about implementing it in our php based web application.

Answer 1

PHP as a dynamic XML rendering platform is limited by having only XSLT 1.0 as a native library for transforms within PHP as the logic layer. However, this standard LAMP/WAMP platform works fairly well for dynamic delivery of DITA content if you treat topics and maps as individually-addressable resources bypassing the usual multi-pass, map-driven processing.

I've been developing this concept into a DITA-based site-building tool that I've named expeDITA. I had put some earlier code for this project into SourceForge but I don't recommend using that code base--it was an RPC-based proof of concept whereas the latest version supports RESTful addressing with a front controller setup and vastly improved theming. The latest version is just about ready to put into a new project, and now that conference season is over for me, I can focus on prepping the docs and headers.

For the moment, you can check out this latest code running on a staging server at http://expedita.x10host.com/. But note that this free-hosted site seems to throttle access to the DTDs from time to time, hosing the class-based transforms for minutes at a time. Once I get the project into a repository, I'll set up a demo site on a less persnickety hosted account.

If you are looking for full DITA rendering, this is not the project for you. The typical use case here would be for any web presence for which DITA as source would be preferred over HTML. You might use it as a wiki for collecting SME contributions as DITA source, or to use DITA's filtering and flagging features to produce adaptive content for responsive themes, or to produce site content that can be aggregated as a single-page view or served via API as XML or JSON formats for consuming in mobile apps. I've even added slide capabilities that might fit into dynamic eLearning content delivery modes.

This blog post gives some background into the project and its goals: http://contelligencegroup.com/ditaperday/what-is-dita-for-the-web/ . I hope this is helpful information. Can you mention more about what goals you have for a hosted DITA application? Would the serve-on-demand model work okay for you, or do you require the map-driven extended features of DITA-OT/DITAC based processing?