[resent -- seems to have been lost]
Reinhard Poetz wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
I'm sorry to say that over time, I found Cocoon to be more an
obstactle for complex webapps pages (not talking about flow) than a
real help, and that's why I'm moving away from it. So I don't care as
much as I did...
Can you give conrete examples on what these obstacles are?
Well, here are some:
- in complex use cases the GUI logic, as Carsten's use case exemplifies,
becomes spread all over the pipeline, and it becomes increasingly
difficult to understand what happens where.
- client/server communication with JSON makes it really easy to build
Ajax apps, but is a pain to produce from Cocoon unless we directly send
it from the controller, which actually makes Cocoon pipelines useless.
- Dojo widgets are a nice replacement for CForm's styling stylesheets,
reduce the server load, and again make pipelines less useful.
- enhancing the CForms styling leads to a giant XSL (even if
modularized) where every possible styling used in the application must
be present.
- since only CForms has Ajax integration, people are over-using it for
presentation purposes (e.g. paginated repeater)
Don't get me wrong: Cocoon is a killer for publication. But for webapps,
other approaches, more Java-centric, are worth considering. My current
choice is Wicket, which was just proposed for incubation.
Cocoon allows lots of non-Java people to build complicated stuff, and
this is a major achievement. But I find it easier to write Java if
you're fluent with it rather than finding workarounds in an XML-centric
framework.
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
