Le Dimanche, 23 mars 2003, à 15:25 Europe/Zurich, Stefano Mazzocchi a écrit :
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Before you jump up and down and scream "no, no, binaries are easier for our users", get off your life-without-a-compiler-windows-inflicted-mindset and think that every JDK comes with a compiler.
Technically, I'm with you all the way but *psychologically* and from a marketing point of view I'd be -1 on making a source-only distribution.
Oh, sure, but I was thinking of calling the distribution
Apache_Cocoon_2.1.zip (or something like that)
so it won't have "source" written anywhere.
IMHO this would only reinforce the feeling that Cocoon is meant for bearded unix gurus.
I hear you.
I know many people who would be very afraid of having to *compile* Cocoon before using it, maybe for fear that it would recompile their desktop into KDE at the same time ;-)
So don't tell them they have to. In short, they have to 'configure' and 'build' their webapps. If, during the process, some program does something else on some data, hey, their installer does it anyway :)
I think Nicola is right about the need to distribute a full-blown .war file (for life-without-a-compiler users) and a .jar (for other projects that use Cocoon).
I'm -0.9 on a war and +1 on the jars (those would be cocoon.jar and cocoon-deprecated.jar, cocoon-scratchpad.jar)
The reason is that a WAR is too monolithic and our samples are not *meant* to be a black box that people uses.
if we were to develop, say, a cocoon-based webmail, then I would have no problems in distributing a war. But we are shipping a framework and the mindset of our users is *already* into the 'development' realm.
maybe not all of them are beareded unix gurus (BTW, all the unix gurus I know don't have a beard, sign of the generation changes?) but for sure all of them want to use Cocoon to build stuff and I think (but maybe I'm wrong) they'd rather start small and grow than start huge and dismantle.
Stefano.
