I'm back from a short vacation in beautiful Chicago (it really is much nicer than Toronto or Montreal) and have waded back in to Cocoon for a couple of days.
After just a few hours of poking around I have decided that it will be much simpler for me to simply hand-code a whole hat-full of servlets than to try and pull any meaning out of Cocoon and it's documentation. Fifteen hours on the Interstate wasn't as challenging as trying to figure out how one should check a Web Form this month but I didn't have that feeling of travelling backwards half of the time. I was also able to predict and achieve forward progress (for a change). Thanks guys, but no thanks. Maybe I'm getting old, but I really don't understand the need for all of the complexity and the lack of documentation in this product. On the other hand, I used to feel the same way about the mind-numbing complexity of a certain thirty-year-old mainframe operating system (MVS) produced by IBM back in the sixties and it's patching system (SMP4). So it can't just be my age. Anyway, Cocoon has cost me far morte (a typo that's better than the original word) time than it was worth. The chief problems appear to have been endlessly re-invented terminology for an overwhelming number of 'new concepts' and a complete lack of consistency between different components (i.e. functional code, non-functional examples, unbuildable documentation and a website that doesn't match up with any single released version of the project). I have a lot of respect for the ability of the people who have built this project, but I want them to know that their project appears to be out-of-control and could become very difficult to manage. If experienced developers (like myself) can't figure out how to use enough features in the product to make it worth using, then penetration will be limited and all of your efforts will be wasted. There is more to this business than stuffing in features at the expense of documentation and testing. You have a lot of very good ideas, but the execution of the project as a whole seems to be suffering. I know that I will often look at my JSP and servlet code and think 'XSP and Cocoon were sooo much better!' until I remember that I wasn't ever able to use enough of Cocoon to make a profit. Oh, well, at least all of my test systems have bags of memory now! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
