Joerg Heinicke wrote:
On 30.09.2005 23:57, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Over the last 6 months, I worked pretty heavily on Mozilla as a
platform.
As you might know I (or we at Virbus at that time) have created an
application built on Mozilla [1] [2].
but most important, is that pretty much everything that cocoon was
born to do, you can now do it in firefox directly.
And we also perceived the fact that Cocoon to a large extent was no
longer used in the way it was targeted. AFAIR the only "classical"
pipeline was a serializing of business objects to XML and transforming
these structures to RDF. The other tasks could have been done by other
software too, e.g. delivering static resources. So, yes, I can agree
to a certain extent to your thoughts.
I do that for my latest web sites and the more I learn how to driven
the client, the less I feel the need for advanced server frameworks.
Is it just me? Is client side advancement making cocoon and all its
machinery
to compensate for advanced web client obsolete and archaic?
No. Cocoon is not and will not become obselete IMO. First you need a
server framework, somewhat has still to respond to requests. Now must
it be an advanced one? What's advanced? Is Struts advanced? Must it be
Cocoon?
At least I prefer it by far. Cocoon is the most flexible framework and
is probably the one that best suits to the new requirements. So Cocoon
has maybe to move its focus - for the case rich clients really take
off. But I can see that frameworks like Struts with a focus on just
view and controller might become obsolete.
For Cocoon removing the creation of UIs from the server still leaves
enough room as integration platform (serializing business objects,
getting data from anywhere) or for fulfilling non-functional
requirements, e.g. caching.
+1 (not much time for a lengthy answer).
With Forms+Ajax, it's true that Cocoon is somehow underused: very few
pipelines definitions, and most of the work is done in flowscripts and
jxtemplates (and of course business logic classes). So we may wonder why
using Cocoon at all for this. Well, just cforms + flowscript +
continuations makes it so easy! Add some automatic binding to
database/object model that seems to be in the air currently, and that
will be even easier.
Now as has been said, life is not just about webapps, but also about
complex publishing and fetching and storing data here and there. And
Cocoon will shine for a long time here.
Also, Mozilla is definitely cool and powerful, but we can't say that
Cocoon must be trashed because Mozilla can be used as an application
platform: JavaWebStart makes the same promise, and how many widespread
apps use it?
Finally, thinking that everybody will use Mozilla is a dream (and a
dictator's one -- think monopoly):
- on the desktop Microsoft, like it or not, is the dominant player, and
there is Safari, Konqueror, etc...
- the mobile web is taking off, and these terminals don't have xul nor
xslt inside,
- millions of people in emerging countries will use low-end PCs with a
simple browser [1] [2]
And Cocoon is a great tool to target all these various browsers.
Now it's true that Cocoon became fat over the years, and that it should
be put on diet. But this is a difficult thing as so many users rely on
the fat...
Sylvain
[1] http://www.techreview.com/articles/05/09/wo/wo_092805bullis.asp
[2] http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://people.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
