Sylvain Wallez wrote: > Tell me your thoughts. Am I completely off-track, or do you also want to > build this great new thing? > Hmm, I don't know - I think your ideas make mostly sense (we already discussed some of them in the past), but for me these are technical details (I don't say that they are not important). But I think, we need a vision for 3.0 - what do we want to achieve?
Now, most of the alternatives to Cocoon have one thing in common: they are easy too learn and you can start quickly (and most of them have the "start quick and fail later" problem but that's another story). Whereas if you want to use Cocoon, you can't start right away. There is so much to learn, so many different files you have to write/adjust. Why do managers love Struts or JSF? It's a "standard" but even more important, they have tools. Fancy tools sell your product, that's the bitter truth. And I have the feeling, that products, that don't have tools but are "just cool", will not be used anymore (it's just a feeling). I think from a technological point of view, Cocoon is still at the top, we can easily support ajax, we could integrate Spring or spring flow if required etc. But I think, developing with Cocoon needs to be more productive than it is today. Just an example, CForms is a great framework, it offers everything you need - but providing a simple form for editing a bean requires several different files to be created. In the end it comes down to the following two things: we need a good documentation and it must be productive to develop with Cocoon. I'm not a believer of all these "too-much-magic" frameworks or generating stuff. So I think using Cocoon should be simpler and we need tools. Why don't we have tools? For example, we don't have a sitemap editor, we even don't have a simple tool that can validate a sitemap or an xconf etc. Not to mention that developing with Cocoon currently requires to define your own build system. For some of our problems, we already have answers, being it using Maven, implementing real blocks, adding this new feature here and there. And we are very good in agreeing on these things, but we are not that good in actually doing them :( So, yes, I think we need some radical changes for 3.0 - but I fail to see what these should be. There are two things clear for me: developing with Cocoon must get easier, and we'll get this with Maven - and we need much better docs. (Of course, the docs have heavily improved in the last months but many things are simply not documented at all yet). And to give some more meat to discuss (or rant about) as I will be offline for the next ten days: I'm still in the "we don't need OSGi" camp (as some of us are here), as I still believe that it adds to much complexity. But as others (who I trust) believe in this and as I don't have time to work on this, the only way to progress is to not block those who have time to do something. But I come more and more to the conclusion that we simply should use Spring as the base framework and build some class loading stuff on top of it (which we already have with the sitemap classloaders). That would be a simple but sufficient solution. For new (portal) projects, I think it makes sense to use Cocoon as the portal framework, but to use JSF etc to build the portals. Sad, but true. Developing with Cocoon is not productive, so we need to change this :) Ok, I'll now go offline for some time and come back when the waves (hopefully) have cleared... Carsten -- Carsten Ziegeler - Open Source Group, S&N AG http://www.s-und-n.de http://www.osoco.org/weblogs/rael/
