when establishing the Cocoon TLP with the ASF board, we received the comment that the then-submitted mission statement of the Cocoon TLP was self-referencing or recursive, i.e. the Cocoon TLP had as a goal the prosperity of the Cocoon project, with "Cocoon" not being properly defined as a tangible goal on its own. So if the Cocoon community would decide now to start developing a J2EE container (godforbid), we would be allowed to by our mission statement.
I'd like to submit a better mission statement for the upcoming board meeting, keeping in mind future subprojects like Lenya and Forrest (or blocks being spun off as subprojects such as the portal). Looking at what differentiates us from other technologies and frameworks, I feel we should include notions as:
- Java-based (or do we want our mission statement to be technology-neutral?)
- XML/SAX-based pipelines
- the sitemap as a centralized request handling configuration mechanism through decoupling of URI space with request response construction
- different runtime environments (Servlet/CLI/Portlet)
- technical frameworks such as continuation-based flow control, form handling, templating transformers
- functional frameworks such as the portal, linotype
- applications based on top of all this such as Lenya & Forrest
I'll try to wordsmith this into a short mission statement, but I'd like to hear whether this categorization makes sense to you.
Cheers,
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
