Integration with JForum

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hello everyone

Does anybody know about an actual example of integration between JForum and any other web application ?...Any docs that may be helpful ?. I'm trying to integrate JForum with an existing web app that requires forum functionality. Thanks.

Renato
[originally posted on jforum.net by rmorais]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I've tightly integrated it with my work's educational platform (proprietary so I can show it off... sigh).

Other's I've seen recently are:

http://www.bigblueplanet.com/
http://www.jnuke.com/

(Apologizes to any I missed).

The level of integration depends on the amount of work you want to do. Simple integration is just a matter of getting some sort of of SSO to work so that your users will automatically get Jforum users.

Tight integration gets into making user info a combination of your apps's user info and jforum's user info; integrating your Applications' groups with jForums's group model; and optionaly creating some admin interfaces that match your apps better.

The places to start are the SSO sections in the Documents and the various threads here. Then dive into the DAO implimentation code to really get a feel from how user and group info is populated.

Along the way, you will eventually need to look at the template files to hide features you don't want or generate different URL's etc.

And BTW, one of the goals of jForum 3 is to look at making integration easier. But that's not even in Alpha stage.


[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I had a specific question regarding integration. I've so far taken the simplistic approach of just populating the database tables directly based on the group/forum/user setup that I want. This works great except that i need to restart my servlet engine to have Jforum see my updates. Is there something in the API I could call to avoid having to do this restart, so that as users and forums are added to the database tables, Jforum will dynamically see and use them? Or will I have to call the Jforum code for directly for adding the information to the table, instead of going underneath the Jforum code?

Thanks,
Jeff
[originally posted on jforum.net by netbracketsJeff]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

What I did was to look at the various Action classes of the Admin screens for things I needed to do outside of jForum.

I used these as a "template" for what *Repository calls needed to be made to properly update the cache info. Not that this means that the code must be running in the same webapp as jForum in order to get to the cache objects.

FWIW, since my admin console was in a different webapp, I used the a cross contect call via resourceDispatcher to make some of the code run in the jForum webapp. Note cross context generally needs to be enabled and even thought its part of the standard, some App servers may not support it (Tomcat does).

Another alternative to this would be to try manually clearing the cache via the jForum admin screens. The only thing I'm not sure about is if all the required cached info would be cleared. I seem to remember that the securityCache might not be part of that...but I could be wrong.


[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

OK, thanks for the info. I think for now I'm just going to tell them it will take up to 24 hours for their username to be activated on the forum, and then restart tomcat once a night. I'll only have to do this for about a week, and then there won't be any new forums or users being created.
[originally posted on jforum.net by netbracketsJeff]