Vadim Gritsenko wrote:
You are here to help grow and maintain community as a whole, and
community currently needs more often releases much more than a stable
cforms block (which is just a bit of software, at the end of the day).
Vadim
Vadim,
I guess I have to more completely respond to this.
If you were to review my posts back to when I first started getting
involved with this community you would find that I have always advocated
treating Cocoon as a software "product", just as websphere, weblogic
are. JBoss, Tomcat, the Apache web server, struts and many other open
source projects all seem to behave that way. Yet within the Cocoon
community there seems to be a resistance to that. And I don't believe
that is good for the long term health of Cocoon. While there is an
awful lot of creativity here just take a look at our list of blocks. How
many are stable vs. unstable? How long will we leave unstable blocks to
just sit around? Now I can tolerate this to a large degree with most of
these because they don't seem to have a large user base so they don't
cause a lot of harm (although they do cause problems in how Cocoon is
perceived).
I worked for 17 years at a company that produced performance monitoring
products for IBM mainframes. We dealt with real customers and their
problems all the time. I got very used to putting the company's
customers first. What I am doing within this community is a carryover
from that. I believe Cocoon's customers - which includes me my employer
and everyone else on this list - deserve a stable framework with which
they can deliver the products that they create, deploy and sell. I
don't believe Cocoon is a play-toy that we can tweek to our hearts
content until it is perfect at the expense of our customers. And that
is what I see going on here.
I have a simple question - if you had to pay for Cocoon and were told
that every few months a new release was going to come out but that to
upgrade you'd probably have to modify your software to use it, would you
buy it or look elsewhere. I know what my answer would be. We already
have a hard enough time convincing folks that Cocoon is a great way to
build internet applications. We don't need that as well.
So while you can argue about frequent releases or whatever, I still want
a forms framework that this community is willing to call "stable".
Ralph
