Shaman is made of 3 different subsystems : Spirit, Insight, and Legend.

Spirit is a Cocoon application, delivering a Web front-end to the User. Taking advantage of Cocoon's unchallenged flexibility, it "carries the shock" of feature evolvings. It can be seen as the "nervous system" of Shaman.

Insight is the core buisness logic. It offers an Object semantic for low-level Content Management features. It also makes persistence transparent for other systems. In other words, it is a CMS-oriented database.

The OperationGate interface shown in the diagram below represents a simple interface which accepts Operation objects. This makes concurrency handling and parameter passing much easier.

Could be seen as the "spine" of the system, where too much flexibility is not desirable for keeping the system standing.

Legend is the WebDAV repository, in which Authors store their "work-in-progress". We chose Apache Jakarta-Slide as WebDAV server implementation.

Here is the big picture :

Spirit queries Insight for accessing all persistent data. The queries take form of serialized, specialized objects, with an adapted semantic. Access to those objects are encapsulated in a Cocoon Logicsheet (see Cocoon's Logicsheets documentation for more details).

Slide (our WebDAV server implementation) relies on Tomcat's Realms for user authentication (see Tomcat's Realms documentation for more details). We provide an implementation of Tomcat's Realm which accesses Insight User repository.

WebDAV servers have their own User repository. We chose to take the easy way by providing a Tomcat Realm implementation to Slide. As counterpart, the WebDAV server must be able to fetch User information in a Tomcat Realm. Currently, only Slide does this. Future versions of Insight may offer a LDAP interface for allowing more interoperability with other WebDAV servers.

Insight pulls content files out of Legend when asked to. Then Insight keeps a copy of pulled content.