On 27 May 2005, at 17:52, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
That's what I'm after. So you see a roadmap whereby first you work on
easy kernel installation -then- play semantics.
Correct. The other way around would make the goal even harder to
bootstrap. No advancement in an open source software happens if you
don't capture some development momentum that is greater than just one
guy wanting it, especially for such deep and complex architectural
issues.
Understood, of course.
The issues right now are not with semantics, but with the actual
operativity of a block design. (see the excellent various RTs on the
matter)
/me goes read some more.
Where do you think the struggle to achieve automatic block deployment
resides? (again, please take this question as journalistic vs.
informed)
in dependency maintenance. see debian, gentoo, bsd ports... the hard
thing is to keep up with the dependency graph, but luckily this is a
very parallizable tasks (in terms of people that can work on it without
stepping on each other toes)
I see. That of course makes a lot of sense, and it -is- something I can
write about, since my remit is not necessarily to get people's hopes
up, but to try to gauge the state of development and report accurately
on it.
My remit for this report is to answer as clearly as I can as to
whether
that is very far in the future or perhaps not as far as they think.
I honestly doubt something like that can happen out of cocoon in a
short
time... because this community is not interested in it and that
community doesn't have the skills to make it happen technologically (or
even phrase what they want in a way that developers could understand).
Of course; that's partly why JISC are skeptical of it, at a senior
level.
Can you see piggy banks being used by applications other than Firefox?
(I assume because it relies on RDF, Firefox is simple the tool you're
using for its -present- form, and that anything people write that can
speak and interact with RDF stores will be able to talk to it).
Yes, PB is the firefox plugin, but the engine is called Longwell
(http://simile.mit.edu/longwell/), that's the RDF presentation
framework
(you can think of it as a cocoon for RDF) and it's usable (today)
already
Ahh. The picture clears (I'd forgotten you mentioned Longwell some time
ago.)
Its a bit like asking a football manager 'so do you think you'll win
the
League this year?'.
yeah, that's how it sounded. :-)
Heh. My bad.
I honestly don't know and it feels to me that the question might be
bogus already. M$ office contains access and it's very easy to use tool
to create a personal database. But how many of the milions of office
users use it? not a lot.
Indeed. And more than likely, it -is- the wrong question to ask.
Do we want cocoon to become the ultimate RAD tool? a visual basic for
the web? I don't. It's a lot of pain and no fun at all (content
management systems show you that pain, just allowing them to write
content is such a painful environment to be in)
Agree; one of the things JISC is eager to find out is whether their
scepticism about general humanists building webapps outta thin air is
well-founded. Hearing this, I would say so. Perhaps though, this topic
deserves to be clarified, so that the ongoing UK discussion focuses
more on concrete issues (block deployment, etc) and less on pipe
dreams.
This isn't a commercial, VC-led, vampiric question, Stefano.
Oh, I know, don't worry.
Huh phew. You never know, these days.
I don't
have any intention of packaging Cocoon or making nice little shiny
toys
with it.
And if you did, I wouldn't have a problem with it... because *you* were
going to pay the price for supporting those users, not us ;-)
ROFL. Quite. Which is why when VCs talk to us, we now say 'Get a real
job'.
I'll leave people with more time and money and less worries
than me to do that. Its a question from researchers just like you, but
from different disciplines (mainly the Humanities), who are hoping the
tools you guys build will get easier to use with time, and would love
to
now when, how, etc.
Take the pain of content management and multiply by a thousand. that's
what it feels like to me.
Gotcha. And of course, I imagine most people share that sentiment.
Would we get closer? yes. How? I have no clue. For now, I focus on data
interoperability and that's a hard enough problem to solve, and we just
add a little tiny layer of declerative reasoning and it already has
severe problems.
Excellent point. One that I can use, too. The problem being that
co-operation (The Evolution of Co-Operation, Axelrod, 1980) is possible
because it emerges out of working communities, but the inference behind
declarative reasoning, when attempting to pre-empt that communities
movements, if charged with pre-empting order within chaos, which is
neigh to impossible.
I told you privately to buy Lego mindstorms. Do it. Then play with it.
It's probably the simplest to use programming language ever invented
(and visual!). Do you see a humanity professor using it? I don't.
/me looks at mindstorms kit on amazon and wonders whether his wife will
castrate him for spending �160
hey wait, I have a child on the way, maybe I can justify "i'm just
getting READY for it, alright?"
Thanks for your time, Stefano, it was really helpful.
Cheers,
David
--
David Plans Casal, Director of Research, Luminas Internet Applications
Tel: +44 (0)870 741 6658 Fax: +44 (0)700 598 1135
Web: www.luminas.co.uk Orixo alliance: http://www.orixo.com/
