On Sunday, Oct 26, 2003, at 21:22 Europe/Rome, Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
If this means "shielding" users from the need of having a block, I completely rest my case. But we need to have backward compatibility to what we have now: unpack war (or go to build/webapp) and work from there. Anything more complicated, no matter what the advantages are, would just be overkill to the average user.
Let me start saying that 'usability of the system during development' is a top priority and must work with blocks as well. The use of a blockpath is an idea, but there could be others on the table.
Anyway, the concern of "make it simple for developers" is (and has always been) a top priority for me. This is a different concern in whether we want inheritance to happen at the sitemap level or at the block level.
Sylvain and I say that it should be at the block level, you say it should be at the sitemap level.
Note: the above does *NOT* have anything to do with regular WAR-style deployment. Once blocks are deployed, you can repack everything in a war file and use that. so blocks or sitemap nothing changes.
there are two big advantages in block-level that are missed at sitemap level:
1) transparent versioning 2) solid isolation
Everybody knows that composition should be favored over inheritance.
Make it *easy* for people to abuse something, and they will. massively.
actions, resources, and now inheritance. I fear abuse.
Blocks are an obstacle, yes, but a little one and one that forces people to think.
I know you can't force people to think. but if you are a cocoon user you are used to be guided a little bit. perl users, for example, wouldn't like cocoon because it's too rigid.
I don't want to make it any more rigid, but I don't want to make it any more loose either, this is why inheritance should go along with a compositional design, not otherwise.
but I understand this is a subjective thing, so, we might want to hear other bells on this.
-- Stefano.
