So having spent the weekend going though at least the transform changes to
the mav 2.1 api, I have a couple comments/questions.

First, there is the new class TransformStep which basically seems to do the
work that Transform did under 2.0. The Transform interface now just has one
method, createStep, making it basically just a factory for a TransformStep.
Since TransformFactory is a factory for creating a Transform, it seems that
what we have is a factory (TransformFactory) that creates a factory
(Transform) that creates a class (TransformStep). Is it not possible to lose
the middle man? (i.e. is Transform any longer even necessary)?

Second, while I did eventually (with Jeff's guidance) get opt-fop working
under 2.1, the logic behind getting the result you are supposed to be
writing to seems a bit confused when using AbstractTransformStep. I still
don't think it is clear that if I want to get my outputstream, I need to
call this.getNext().getResponse().getOutputStream(). Logically, I want to
call this.getResponse(), but because of the way it is set up, that gives me
the response the previous step wrote to. Why would I ever want the result of
this.getResponse(), and even if I would, why would I want that to be the
default behaviour (wouldn't something like getPreviousResponse() be clearer
for this behaviour)? I think most people would expect when calling
this.getResponse(), that they would expect to get their response for writing
to. Once Jeff explained to me what was going on, I was able to get it
working, but I still don't think it is very clear, and I am worried that it
will lead to a lot of frustration by others trying to write other
transforms.

Note. This isn't meant to be a rant. I think the heterogenous transforms are
amazing--I don't know of any other framework that supports anything nearly
this cool. I just wonder if things could be a bit clearer.

--jim


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