Andrew et al. Andrew ... thanks for the kind words ... and yes I am co-authoring a book on Cocoon 2 due out on October 18. http://www.netswirl.com/publications.htm for details.
John Austin's message that triggered this thread was exactly what I felt and experienced when I started working on Cocoon. His message expressed very effectively what I felt and thought ... however I could not put down what my words on the mailing list, because I can cuss and swear in three different languages!!! :-) and I did not want to offend users on the list ... I am quite sure no one wanted to read that kind of feedback on this mailing list. The reason I got into Cocoon was solely to co-author this book. If it was not the goal of the project then who knows I may have given up many months ago. I have worked on many projects (software enhancements and code maintenance) where there were absolutely no documentation and the original developers were not around anymore. The Cocoon project does have documentation that has evolved over time so I did not consider this an unsurmountable challenge. The configuration files have sufficient examples and notes for anyone with enough of years of experience (and the time and motivation) to dig deeper, connect the dots and understand the system. Someone of John Austin's calibre and work experience should not have much trouble after climbing the initial hump of the learning curve. My motivation was moving forward in my understanding of Cocoon and fulfilling my obligations to the publisher. Having spent the last 5 months finding my way around, I can truly say that with the proper nuturing, support and documentation, Cocoon 2 will be adopted widely and make inroads into the developer community. We tried to make the coverage of the topics a chronicle of our experiences learning Cocoon for the first time. It is a stepwise documentation of the steps we took to understand Cocoon from a very high level and it's place in the grand scheme of web publishing and content/document management. Subsequent chapters by myself and my co-authors went through the stages of systematically building examples to target common software projects. Our book can be used as a primer to help users get started in Cocoon and then use the blocks like a leggo set and their own experience and maturity in the field to extrapolate and build more complex systems. At last count there were four books to be released in the next few months. These books from my understanding be adequate documentation of the Cocoon 2 sytems. There will no doubt be advanced books written once the initial wave of books help developers find their bearings and mature in their understanding of the system. I can also vouche for the excellent support and encouragement from experts on this list. Their insight and support helped me along the way. If I named everyone this message would go out of bounds. Even if you don't have a specific question, just following along with any thread will help you understand specific topics that you can then use to experiment with and expand to create your own functioning system. Subject to me finding sometime, I will try and volunteer to expand some of the Cocoon documentation on the Apache web site. There was a request for assistance a few months back when I was overwhelmed with my work, and I will try and find the person who had put out the message and offer some kind of help. John, I hope the feedback helps to put things into perspective. I can truly say Cocoon is not that difficult to understand. Perhaps you can revisit the testing of the system when the books have hit the market. Best wishes to all and keep Cocooning !! Conrad D'Cruz Original Message: ----------------- From: Andrew C. Oliver [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 07:18:29 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Giving up! Cocoon too big, slow and confusing > > >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). > > I hope you had a nice trip. Web Form stuff is a bit beta at the moment, so you'll need to excercise patience and a willingness to help. >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. > > Perhaps its not a product at all, maybe its a software development community and a project all wrapped up into one. >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 > You seem lively to me. >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). > > So did you fix them? Did you raise these points and offer to help? >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'm significantly less experienced and I figured a large amount of it out. You: "Oh I can't figure it out I'm leaving" Me: "How do I....?" "What is a....?" And I'm working on creating an example webapp (http://www.superlinksoftware.com/cocoon/samples/bringmethis/index.html) that utilizes forms, etc. I'll accompany it (NOT RIGHT AWAY) with explanations and documentation (written in plain English). >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. > I run Cocoon in fairly low amount of memory. Certainly more than JSP and a Servlet, but then again when I load the Connection pooling, caching, and other services a serious JSP application would require, I'm not so sure it comes that far ahead While I agree with many of your criticisms, especially the Avalonian (language of the Avalon-> Cocoon developers) and lack of meaningful documentation, I adamntly believe that the problem here lies within you. This is participatory software. You didn't pay for it. You don't get to call up Microsoft support and scream at them and wonder why they come back at you 2 weeks later with the wrong answer and "wait for service pack 2 for a fix". You fix it. If you're lucky, you fix it in collaboration with others! Next, as I get older I get more patient. I'd hate to see how impatient you were at my age or Wow. There are MULTIPLE books coming out on Cocoon, some by its very developers others by great folks like Conrad D'Cruz. In the next few months, such things will be clearer. Personally, I think if you have this attitude "If I can't figure it out it must suck and I'll take my cookies and go home" then I think you're contributing to this software development community in the best possible way you ever could.....leaving it before you break something. If you're perhaps new to opensource community-based development, maybe you should ask for help and take some more time to read up on the subject. You'll find if you expend the effort, folks can be downright friendly and helpful. Of course its up to you. And psychological theory indicates you'll read this and disregard it. So I'm more writing it for the next person that comes along. Hope this helps! -Andy >Oh, well, at least all of my test systems have bags of memory now! > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >Please check that your question has not already been answered in the >FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> > >To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
