Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
...
The strong architectural parallel between mozilla and cocoon, makes me
very hopeful in the future of mozilla as a platform, even if there are
years ahead of polishing to do.
I also want the GUI executed in the browser, but as many allready have
said, the future isn't here yet. Mozilla isn't everywhere and if the new
IE is atractive enough, it might never be.
But as a researcher, a scientist and one that likes to push the edge,
I sense that cocoon is kinda 'done', not as in "finished, passe'", but
more as in "been there, done that".
Sure, lots of things to polish and little things to continue to improve,
Like making it easy to build applications with, for a large group of
users ;) Polish and making Cocoon mainstream might not be as sexy from a
research POV. OTH, if we succeed in attracting a large user base, it
means a lot of other kind of oportunities, that can be exiting in its
own sense, but maybe for another personality type.
but I wonder if the action is somewhere else.
XML pipelines, component orientation and IOC containers, continuations
and maybe more things that once where highly inovative, are used by
other projects and some of it even start to become design patterns. And
our versions of the ideas might feel obsolete in contrast to some of the
newer implementations.
OTH, we have been fairly good in keeping buzz word compliance, we have
AJAX and can use Spring within Cocoon, e.g.
As a side note Apache's next generation WS-architecture, Axis2 is based
on XML pipelines. And they have (at least at some points) improved
compared to what we have. The piplines are pull based instead of push
based, which makes it easier to write code and makes whole new access
patterns for data possible. Also it is based on in and out pipes which
in my biased vew, is a large plus.
Java modularization in general and with OSGi in particular might well
become the "next big thing". And here we, in my likewise biased view,
are doing interesting things and we are also starting cooperation with
other communities. I also think that polymorphic sitemap inharitance
will make reusability of webapps possible at a completely new level.
How do you feel about this?
There will IMO be a need for server side functionality in the future as
well, although what is served will change. As long as we are a strong
community we will adapt to the changing circumstances. And as long as we
do that, Cocoon will not become obsolete.
The main threat IMO is that Cocoon is too fat, monolithic, closed and
hard to understand for new commers (and old timers as well). Which makes
it harder to adapt to change.
With blocks and refactoring we can make it adaptable again. But it
requires hard work and a lot of determination.
/Daniel
