Hi Cocoon-Users,
I followed the threads about a blank cocoon.war and I can understand the arguments of the people voting agains something like this and I can understand the problem some users have. When I started in the area of web applications it was often hard for me to solve even the simplest problems -- having such an option would have saved me lots of hours of work.
By the way I never mentioned (in this round of the discussion at least) that I (and I think every committer) understand completely the need and desire for a binary Cocoon dist. It's only the impracticality of it as things stand in 2.1 that has kept it from happening.
So yesterday evening I started to hack a small project that I would like to introduce now and get some feedback - maybe it will again this week if you convince me :)
great!
My idea was to offer cocoon creator. It's a web application (at the of this writing in PHP -- I will convert it to cocoon if the concept is good enough) asking you some build-specific question (JDK to build, Cocoon version, blocks to include). Based on this information it will start to build a customized version of cocoon and offer it to download to user.
I have considered doing something like this with Ant which has built in support for interactive properties which can also be scripted for later rebuilds. But I think your idea of doing it over the web is worth pursuing (except you're stuck paying for the bandwidth).
As I see it, these are the problems people have with the build process:
1) emotional shock at having to build at all.
2) java environment problems (jvm instead of jdk, JAVA_HOME not set, endorsed libs problem?)
3) winzip empty libs problem
4) failure to read INSTALL.txt
5) trouble deciphering the options in build.properties and blocks.properties
6) misinterpreting build output (warnings!=failure !)
the web based builder idea helps with all of those, except postpones the problem with java environment (#2).
...
If someone is interested in testing this app please contact me and I will send you the URL.
sure - let me know.
Any other comments, flames or ideas are also welcome!
The worst you'll ever get from me is disagreement but don't let that bother you.
Geoff
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