Hi Lenya devs,
up to now, the migration to Cocoon 2.2 was mainly a matter of
industriously converting Avalon service manager calls to bean wiring.
Now that the main Java services are working, the next step is to get the
web application to run.
In the beginning I thought that modules could be converted to blocks.
But now I noticed that they are conceptually quite different:
Lenya modules
=============
A Lenya module is a white box. Basically, it is a set of resources. All
resources are exposed and can be addressed using the fallback://
protocol. This way, module A can call module B without explicitly
knowing that B exists. A simple example is the usecase module – you can
register a module X with some usecases, and the usecase module can
execute these usecases because it can just access URIs like
fallback://lenya/modules/X/usecases/foo.jx.
The major disadvantage of this approach is obvious – by exposing all
resources, there is no encapsulation, which makes it very hard to hide
implementation details and preserve backwards compatibility.
Cocoon blocks
=============
A block in Cocoon is a black box. It exposes its functionality via
servlet services [1], for an example see [2]. This way, the API
(service) is clearly separated from the implementation (internal pipelines).
There is one major snag to it – if block A wants to make a call to block
B, it has to know that B exists. This connection has to be hard-coded in
the block servlet declaration. Of course we can't require our users to
register their resource types with all generic blocks that operate on
resources. Patching the files would also very ugly. I sent a mail to
d...@cocoon regarding this issue.
IMO the Cocoon block concept is much clearer and allows for a much
better separation of API and implementation (public service pipelines
vs. private resources).
However, your opinions or suggestions on the relation between modules
and blocks are very much appreciated!
[1]
http://cocoon.apache.org/subprojects/servlet-service/1.0/servlet-service-impl/1.0/1412_1_1.html
[2] http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/1291_1_1.html
-- Andreas
--
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01
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