Back from Germany

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

All right, I'm back from Germany.

Last week I tried to make it for the Frankfurt gettogether but I had a car crash and I couldn't make it. :/ Luckily nobody got hurt, I just couldn't drive any longer and I had to come back home.

So I took the plain to Bonn where I spoke at the http://netzspannung.org workshop

http://netzspannung.org/workshops/online-archives/program/#Panel_3

The speech was 'The Economy of Distributed Metadata Authoring' and was, in short, a critic to the semantic web technologies from a socio-economical point of view.

I managed to get a vew people depressed (sort of: what are we going to do now?) but I got very positive feedback, expecially from the oldest people (wisest?). Ah, you can see the webcast if you're really interested (there were some neat stuff in my panel, very interesting projects, expecially with the use of heuristically extracted MPEG-7 metadata from video streams. Cool stuff.)

Anyway, after that, I took the train up to Paderborn to visit Carsten and Matthew. (first thing I learned: german trains are not so 'on-time' like the stereotype suggest. second: they are *very* expensive!)

Anyway, I reached Paderborn during a pretty heavy storm (as usual!) and we went visiting the 'computer museum' at the old Nixdorf offices.

We had a great time there :) And it was soo cool to see a Commodore Vic-20 exposed in a museum since I stil have mine functioning at home :)

But the downside is that I felt kinda old, you know :) Gee, 21 years of programming experience and 28 years-old. I think I should get a life one day :)

Anyway, I won't go over everything that happened there, but the important thing for us is that I finally managed to explain the block concept to Carsten the way I intended it.

And he loved it :)

We agreed not to start implementing it until 2.1 is out but we outlines the system so that it minimizes the impacts on both the current architecture and, more important, on the usability of Cocoon in general.

The idea is to give the users the ability to move to blocks in a very easy and natural way. That is:

phase 1) use Cocoon as you do today. You won't be forced to use blocks if you don't need them or you don't understand them.

phase 2) use blocks just for deployment. This is mostly similar at WAR files today: just package your stuff as a block and deploy it on a running Cocoon.

phase 3) use blocks for deployment and depend on other blocks. This will work sort-of APT-get: when you deploy your block and you need, for example, FOP, Cocoon will deploy your stuff and then go looking for the FOP block and deploy it for you. Of course, the behavior will be all user-selectable and all that but that's the general idea

phase 4) users will start providing their own blocks to others to depend on.

Also, we planned on having a web interface on top of Cocoon for configurations and for block deployment. Of course, all secured and possibly to be turned off for production environments.

NOTE: the current block-like refactorization for Cocoon 2.1 is actually a great thing because it already removes stuff from the 'main cocoon' and cleans up the things that we'll later move on real and dynamically deployable cocoon blocks. So, there is no need to rush or to change what is being going on today.

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Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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