> If I understood correctly, your stream of thought was something on the
> line of:
>
> 1) Unix uses pipelines, Cocoon uses pipelines.
>
> 2) Unix has interactive shells to compose those pipelines (or the
> ability to run scripts for those shells), why shouldn't cocoon have
the
> same concept?
3) The analogy of the sitemap to a filesystem ("the sitemap is like a
specialized filesystem for URIs") could be a very powerful explanation
to first-time and beginner cocoon users. Maybe I should have said,
"Sitemap as Filesystem" instead of "Cocoon as OS". This may be
something to put in the documentation.
4) The presence of a shell would help solidify the analogy.
5) What other design cues can we take from this?
> 1) I've heard talking about Cocoon as a 'XML pipeline engine'... now
you
> are proposing to call it an "web operating system"... the first is too
> little, the second is too much.
Agreed. It's an overstatement.
> 2) an interactive shell isn't really different from what Ovidiu is
> working on (even connecting Emacs directly to the scheme sitemap
engine)
> and I agree that it might be a good parallel to show that he might be
> going in the right direction
Exactly.
> 3) a shell *DOES* *NOT* solve the 'data inward' asymmetry that cocoon
> appears to exhibit. It is a development tool. Possibly a way to author
> the sitemap, but I see *MANY* better solutions.
I was on the weakest ground regarding data flow assymetry. But what
about integrated security? Like the filesystem, is that another concern
island we could wrap into the sitemap? From an application developer's
perspective, security seems like a mess to me (there are so many
options). What if we could make that more seamless? Unless you think
I'm way off base, I'd like to come up with a proposal for this.
Certainly we can and should come up with better administrative solutions
than a shell, but its presence could be comforting to web developers and
administrators, and increase adoption.
Some of these thoughts started out from thinking about the question,
"What is Cocoon?" which I do because I'm always trying to explain it to
people. The website begins with "Apache Cocoon is an XML publishing
framework that raises the usage of XML and XSLT technologies for server
applications to a new level." The beginning of that sentence seems like
it's becoming more and more of an understatement.
Maybe we should say "Cocoon is a web publishing and applications
framework that raises the usage of XML and XSLT technologies for server
applications to a new level."
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