Le 21/07/11 20:54, Reinhard Pötz a écrit : <snip/>
Nevertheless C3 already counts more than 20 subdirectories which is discouraging for people that want to get familiar with the code base. Especially if you don't need all the webapp/REST stuff you only need cocoon-pipeline, cocoon-sax, parent and maybe cocoon-optional. One could say that this problem can be solved with good documentation but the psychological barrier doesn't go away.
Hmm... needing additional documentation is often the sign of some sort of problem. In this case, we may simply have too many modules. Why don't we have a "cocoon-core" module, so that people can know where to look at to understand what Cocoon is about? And this core module should not only be the cocoon-pipeline module, but should also include cocoon-util (3 classes!), cocoon-sax, cocoon-sitemap, cocoon-controller (3 classes again) and even cocoon-stax (Stax is provided in JDK 1.6).
Also, along with providing more meat in the core, let's be opinionated and clearly say what Cocoon is about. For 2.2, the website says "Apache Cocoon is a Spring-based framework (since version 2.2 of Cocoon) built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based development."
Er... and what does this mean for a newcomer, particularly when Spring already has this huge amount of components and whose large number of interfaces and abstract classes could well be confused with "separation of concerns" ?
What about a probably restrictive but clearer "Cocoon is a versatile pipeline processing engine, particularly suited for XML processing and multi-format document publication, but also capable of processing binary content such as images. It provides integration modules with popular frameworks like Spring, Wicket and JAX-RS"?
With a bigger core and a clear tag line, we end up with a project that has 3 times less modules and where additional modules have a clear goal of integrating with a 3rd party library/framework (or providing a very specific feature, which often means also a 3rd party library). And more importantly, we have a core module that can actually *do* something and is not an almost empty shell of abstact concepts like cocoon-pipeline is.
Sorry for this rant, but Cocoon has 2.x has grown into a toolbox for its committers (and I take my share in this), becoming more and more complex and abstract, being a different thing for each of its developers, and has lost its ability to be understood by newcomers. I think learning from this is particularly important if we want to rebuild a vibrant community around Cocoon 3.x
Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
