Berin Loritsch wrote:
Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
To me:
* throwing away the collected work of the community
* building something rather different
* throwing away a strong brand
* leave all the users who has put a trust in us behind
seem like a rather strange way of "saving" Cocoon.
It seemed like a rather strange way of saving Apple as well, but look
what happened. Now I agree about the point on "throwing away a strong
brand", because the focus of any revolution here is to clarify and
crystalize how to use Cocoon efficiently. Now, the point of "leave
all the users who has put a trust in us behind" is a bit of hyperbole
IMO. This community successfully made that transition once before.
And failed a number of times since then.
Anyway, we have "rules for revolutionaries" and so on, go ahead if you
like it. I will continue the evolutionary path and it seem like others
will as well.
I will continue to be proud of our brand, our product and our
community. And I will continue the work on *Cocoon* towards the
future in an evolutionary way, so that those who have put their trust
in us have a reasonable migration path to follow.
I've put a souple years into Cocoon, and I'm proud of the work that
I've done. I like the *concepts* behind Cocoon. The problem is that
I lack the patience to wait for evolution to take place--how long has
it been that real blocks are not a reality in Cocoon? I could
understand if it were just six months and you have to have some time
to make it happen.
You know Berin, we have blocks. Go and read
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=113335919919804&w=2. It
says something interesting about this community that no one have
responded to that message yet. While a thread about marketing and
branding absorbs all the community energy (again).
Is Cocoon all about talk and hype? Is design and programming, and god
forbid refactoring and testing, something old fashioned that we better
stop worrying about?
I take this painfully slow evolutionary pace to mean that we are
unable to adapt quickly enough. That's a real problem. Esp. when I
don't have a clear picture of how blocks is even going to help me.
My friends, the comment of Ruby on Rails and simplicity has hit our
ecosystem. Prepare for an ice age, adapt or die. Slow adaptation
isn't going to cut it. Users have different expectations of their
frameworks now.
Wow! isn't marketing talk fun.
Still I fail to see a common coherent vision for this revolution besides
that current Cocoon is messy. Sure I have seen that Sylvain have
collected some ideas that we have discussed on the list for a while.
Much of it that great stuff, but is it something that can't be achieved
by refactoring Cocoon? And are they so great so that we should spread
ourselves even thinner instead of focus on getting 2.2 out of the door?
IMO the most important step towards getting an uppwards spiral again
is by regaining our and our communities faith in Cocoon, by keeping
our promisses and do a 2.2 release. Instead of running like lemmlings
towards the next shiny thing.
We should focus on our core offerning and getting the parts of it
reusable outside Cocoon and of high quality, following the path
outlined by Marc.
Enjoy that process. There is a lot of pain involved with doing
restructurings of Cocoon. As much as I like Cocoon, I honestly
believe that the effort to bring order out of chaos is going to be
much higher than the effort to build a new system. That's my two cents.
I know about the pain of restructuring Cocoon as I'm have worked with
core related stuff for along time. And getting some proof of concept
code working might not be that hard. But I think that you severly
underestimate the amount of work it will take to get a production
quality system shipping. Not to talk about getting the trust in the new
product when we anounce: "trust us, this time is different, this time we
will behave responsible"
For you attention seekers out there, OSGi based blocks will draw a
lot of attention towards Cocoon, and it is innovation, not immitation.
/Daniel
:) Honestly, too little, too late. Just how much attention has OSGi
received over the years? It's been around at least as long as Avalon,
but Avalon received much more attention (albeit negative attention).
It has been living quietly behind the scenes now for a long time.
OSGi draw enough attention to attract Eclipse. And as it takes a niche
that many projects find really important it starting to get a lot of
attention. Having a pluggin system seem to be the best known mean to
handle great complexity. And because of that many projects have build
own plugin system. Inspired by Eclipse many of them are now starting to
look at OSGi.
The Felix project have taken off lately. Eclipse have restarted its
Equinox project that is entirely dedicated to OSGi and seem to be rather
active. Eclipse 3.2 have OSGi bundle development support. Directory is
moving towards OSGi, Jonas is supposed to have OSGi support and Geronimo
is discussing getting it. There is a number of OSGi talcs on ApacheCon.
I believe that OSGi will be the next hype.
OSGi seem to take the important niche that Avalon could have had if the
Avalon community have had more focus, persistence and responsibility.
/Daniel
