On 29 Jul 2004, at 19:34, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
A little bit of history is needed:
Thanks for your recount of my lurking years. :-)
Now, for those who were not there at that time: Ovidiu's proposal was *NOT* accepted happily. For the most part, it was not understood until several months later. Any mind-bending change of direction is, at first, perceived as creating instability.
I happen to like Ugo's idea to start from scratch with a new implementation of Cocoon.
Ugo (like many others, myself included) is sick of being scared with the complexity of cocoon's code, which strongly reduced his ability to improve on it. His "extreme programming" approach is rather evident: do the simplest thing that can possibly work.
Isn't that also what a user would expect from a framework: a simple thing which just works?
If Cocoon is what it is today, it's not because we remained where we were, but because we allowed people to innovate internally and with an open and friendly attitude and we "guided" our user base in new directions and never failed to provide them a better environment then before.
IMHO, simplicity has to do with predictability. XML grammars have this, scripting languages don't. While the use of a non-XML (scripting?) grammar for the site/flowmap might be clever, it might reduce the predictability. Too much magic for my poor brains. And even XML happens to be abused at times.
I figure Ugo picked Groovy because it is cool. (I'm not a language expert, but JavaScript seems cool enough already, and a tad less immature and trendy than Groovy.) My main concern however is that the separation between pipeline definitions and processing flow is what differentiates Cocoon from many other frameworks, yet this is still something that our users are only beginning to pick up. Many people are still stuck with monstrous sitemaps using all kinds of action/inputmodule/transformer chains - and I don't know whether they will be helped with an even more flexible configuration mechanism.
WDYT?
</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
