Ugo Cei wrote:
Il giorno 07/dic/05, alle ore 11:43, Ross Gardler ha scritto:
Most businesses are made up of common business processes. The odd one
will be unique to that business, but most are common. In the case of
the unique practices the software needs to be customised, but in the
case of common practices an "off-the-shelf" solution is sufficient.
Sorry but I don't believe this dream of high-level, off-the-shelf,
customizable components will ever come to fruition, Cocoon or not. On
this point, I agree with Dan Creswell [1]:
"All attempts at creating high-level business components that can be
re-used and re-configured have failed previously. This failure has not
been for technical reasons - it happens because the requirements that
yielded the original component interface were sufficiently different
from the new requirements so as to require re-writing massive chunks of
functionality."
And David Heinemeier Hansson as well [2]:
"On the surface, the dream of components sounds great and cursory
overviews of new projects also appear to be "a perfect fit". But they
never are. Reuse is hard. Parameterized reuse is even harder. And in
the end, you're left with all the complexity of a swiss army knife that
does everything for no one at great cost and pain."
Off Topic now, but I can't resist...
I agree with both of these quotes 100%. In fact, my academic blue sky
work, in my "previous life", addressed *exactly* the problems identified
within the above quotes. It's all to do with the size of the component
base (not the ease of configurability), the ability to identify "good
enough" components and the ease of building a custom component when
there is no suitable off-the-shelf component. That's why Cocoon can be
applied succesfully in this area, it has the potential to be a very
powerful web platform.
Therefore, for now, I agree that to be useful Cocoon has to be an easy
to use web-development framework. Without that, there is no point in me
carrying on - so I won't (yet)
Ross
[1]: http://jroller.com/page/dancres/20050218#soa_doomed
[2]: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000407.html
