On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 08:48:29AM -0500, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
On 5 Feb 2004, at 06:46, Geoff Howard wrote:
Would there be benefit to keeping it more general: "XML based application and publishing framework and applications built on and in support of that framework".
As for the charter, I agree with Goeff here: we need to keep it general or we would need the board to change our charter every day.
So, I would:
1) keep it language neutral: many people dislike java, but they can leave with it if th application is worth the effort (think lisp and emacs, for example)
2) keep it technology neutral (don't say XML/XSLT/SAX/DOM)
3) aim to identify the achitectural principles (modularity, composability, separation of concerns, feature reductionism)
If the board requires specific technology names, lets keep the technology choices low-key. We could talk about the architectural principles and then just mention that this is "currently implemented using" XYZ technologies. This would let us be specific about the technologies in use now, without creating a social contract to always use this same list of technologies.
I hope the architectural principles are enough so this document will not have to specifically mention Java, SAX, etc. Like Stefano, I think Cocoon's main purpose is to make it possible to follow good design principles, such as SoC, modularity, etc., and pushing certain technologies is merely a side effect of needing to have an actual implementation of the framework.
We should actually be distinguishing carefully here IMO between Cocoon's purpose, and the purpose of the Cocoon TLP. I think we all agree that for the foreseeable future, we should keep Cocoon proper focused on XML pipelines, using Java. If someone wants to make a .Net port of Cocoon and make it work using binary pipelines, using C#, then we could make a sister project within the TLP called Cartoon or something. It would be out of scope for Cocoon to do that, but not necessarily for the TLP.
Now, the question in my mind is "how far to we want the TLP to be allowed to go away from what we now know of Cocoon?" so we don't get a TLP that has to allow projects to do anything with any technology but also don't have undue burden to innovate.
Geoff
