Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
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?
You describe the revolution from the client side. The other part of the
(r)evolution takes place on the server side. There is a change in how enterprise
applications are designed. Just let me throw in the latest buzzword: ESA. One of
my customer's projects goes into this direction and we will live quite happy
without Cocoon, even without *any* server side presentation framework at all
(last week we finally threw out Struts.). Castor-XML and a couple of (very)
simple servlets does everything we need to provide data for a Flash client.
Your question was: Is Cocoon obsolete? Personally, I don't think so. I think
that we will just see a shift in what Cocoon is needed for over the next years.
The question only is: Where is Cocoon shifting to?
a) Cocoon could become *the* client-neutral framework that can support all this
different rich-clients (XUL, XAML, xforms, etc.) *transparently*. Of course this
needs more work on our side to make this happen.
b) Not XUL, XAML or Flash are the least common denominators but Ajax. Ajax is
the only cross-browser alternative. One of my customers wanted to implement a
client based on Flex. This was 10 months ago and Ajax was a football club in
Amsterdam. Over the last weeks his opinion has begun to change and I'm curios
which technology we will finally choose.
Personally I think that alternative b) will become mainstream for many reasons,
the cross-browser argument will only be the strongest. The others are:
- If alternative a) becomes mainstream, what will happen with the thousands of
Struts, JSF, Cocoon, RoR developers? Usually they don't like to write
rich-client apps. Of course ESA will take its toll and more people will have
to write webservices.
- This would also mean that managers would have to admit that they have bet
on the wrong horse and large investments would become obsolete. They will
make sure that this doesn't become obvious.
- The variaty of rich-client alternatives will grow much more because of the
success of mobile clients (PDAs, mobile phones, etc.) and finally the least
common denomintor will be some kind of XHTML and Ajax.
- The world will not agree on one rich client technology. M$ will do it's best
that this will never happen ;-)
--
Reinhard Pötz Independent Consultant, Trainer & (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}
web(log): http://www.poetz.cc
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