Hello! I'm not a Cocoon platform developer, but I dare to submit to this thread, because it sounds rather... depressive.
No! Cocoon is not obsolete! Cocoon is neither obsolete nor deprecated, except that everyone defines it to be, by not improving it. Evolution is taking place in domains that evolve fast and it may happen that something dies, because of the facts behind Darwin's principle, but that is rather seldom. It is more likely that a spiecy is evolving to a higher state. What I mean is that Web version 2 will be completly compatible with Cocoon if Cocoon is going to be evolved further, as it has been until today. Lets take Mozilla as a synonym for software that is capable of at least one of two things (i tried to sieve that out from the last few posts): 1 shifting computing power from the server to the client and/or 2 implementing the pipeline principle of Cocoon In both cases Cocoon is needed, because even a rich client woudn't be a client if there is no server (peer to peer being just a speciel case). Rich clients are not good for everything. If you want to display HTML (XHTML), which will probably still be around for some time (even to come), you might use Cocoon. You might use other server-software that fits better or you might serve statically. You might even use other server software that implements the pipeline principle, but Cocoon does a really good job at converting information, so if you know Cocoon you will likely do use it for that. Semantic web (another next generation www) is a different thing, that has nothing to do with either Cocoon nor Mozilla, except that it might and will/must be implemented by both of them. Someone once said to me that evolution in technology is looking like a spiral. You start with mainframes go to LANs with rich clients (like specialized enterprise resource planning), go to WANs with mainframe like Internet servers (and stupid browsers) and now you will get rich clients again (with mainframe like internet servers and smart browsers). Then you will hear: "oh cool the mainframe"... and you think by yourself (oh no. not this all over again). But in fact you always need clients and servers. Cocoon is mostly implemented to fit on the server side - right now at least. I hope my message is useful to the discussion, Andreas
