Using cocoon isn't a particular problem for me personally, I'm used to working with this stuff and have worked on all tiers of web applications so I have a pretty good insight into where the problems lie. The problem is how to you get a web tier type person to digest this stuff, we know xslt is already a problem in this sense, but ideally if separation of concerns was a reality web tier folk wouldn't need to compile from source. We have folk who are usually working on backend stuff that might recieve a ticket to fix something cocoon releated, there's no quick way in which they can make an intervention without getting bogged down in too much detail about the web tier.
I've got the 2.2 checked out, I'd be happy using it just the project we're working on is between 2-3 parties all of which need to build against the same version. This moving target, while understandable is the crux of the problem. In the past I've managed to get projects to pretty much checkout, perhaps change a db user and pw and build (e.g. struts-spring-hibernate, maven downloads dependencies, xdoclet tags are processed and the mapping files generated, schema is generated from the mapping files, sample data for unit testing and for presention folk inserted, the thing builds and everyone is away. I don't know what I would have done if I had to build struts, spring and/or hibernate during the build, which is the bridge that needs to be crossed with cocoon.
I am working though the source and trying to get myself to a position where I can be more useful. But for the time being, you're right in that I will only be a new user for a short time, in a months time I want have the same insights I do now. If that sounds sarcastic then I can only appologise.
Sorry, I don't get it. What's your message? That Cocoon has bugs and you have to dive into the source code to fix them? Or that our documentation isn't as good as it could be and you have to look into the sources to find out how it works? Or that our build system needs to be improved?
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Reinhard Pötz Independant Consultant, Trainer & (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}web(log): http://www.poetz.cc --------------------------------------------------------------------
