Static export takes the idea of statically serving documents one step further than serving static documents from OpenCms—it removes the dependency of the documents on OpenCms. In short, it exports the contents of the Online project into an entire self-sufficient website that can be served from a run-of-the-mill web server. Most resources are rendered statically, though you still must manually set the export property for JSP pages.

Successfully implementing a static export of this type can be a little tricky. First of all, your site must have very little JSP code, and that which exists must be able to be rendered into static HTML during the publishing cycle (for instance, the site navigation that we examined in Chapter 4 could be safely rendered into HTML for a published project, since its output will always be the same for a published project).