Justin Fagnani-Bell napisał(a):
Hi,
This is probably my 3rd email on the same subject in the past few
years, and I'm sure you get these all the time, but it seem things
haven't gotten much easier, so please excuse me...
I used Cocoon quite a bit in the 1.x days, and was quite comfortable
with XSP, Actions, Generators, etc... Cocoon's changed a lot since
then, and I can't seem to find a clear starting path with the new
technologies. I'm starting a completely new site/application from
scratch. So I'm looking to start right and with the methods that will
carry forward into Cocoon 2.2/3.0.
Hello,
I was playing with Cocoon since 2.0.3 but I have to admit that I was
interested in it more as for research than for real application. Though
I currently build one using Daisy, CForms, JX, Flowscript and Hibernate.
Also I follow discussions on the dev list quite carefully so I can share
*my own* perception.
At first I'm trying to do some very basic CRUD operations on my
database. Before I would use POJOs for the model, Actions for the
controller, and XSP for the view, all using an abstracted database
access layer (that used JDBC). It all seemed pretty simple and made a
lot of sense to me.
Have you seen BricksCMS? [1] It is basically showcase for CRUD
operations done quite easily in Cocoon.
These days XSP is deprecated, Actions might be too, and there's a
plethora of data access frameworks. I know Flow replaces Actions, but
what replaces XSP? XSP is still all over the user documentation and
tutorials. I'm assuming it's some sort of combination of CForms, JX
templates, and maybe Velocity?
XSP is being replaced by Template block. It is refactored and extended
version of JX templates (syntax is pretty the same) which was
back-ported into 2.1.x branch in 2.1.9 AFAIR. Speaking more precisely,
Template cannot do everything XSP did. For example there is no
ESQLequivalent in Template. Thus this responsibility has been carried to
Flowscript/Javaflow. So flowscript have to prepare model for a view.
There's a ton a samples and obviously many ways to do things, but is
there one set of "sanctioned" components/methods to use when starting
a new Cocoon app?
"Sanctioned" way, best practices, call it in way you want is big desire
in Cocoon's community both users and devs, I think. BricksCMS mentioned
above is good example of promoting good practices. C2.2 seems to bring
more tidiness and being decoupled into blocks will change way she lives.
In ideal situation there is no big distribution containing all blocks
around but small core and infrastructure (maven-based) to include those
you really need. So old, not maintained blocks won't be carried anymore
and won't disrupt users' attention. IMO it will lead to situation where
best practices will be better promoted and those not popular will die
more quickly.
As there is the desire of devs to release first milestone of the most
fundamental parts[2] of Cocoon 2.2 it seems reasonable to consider 2.2
not 2.1x branch.
I guess my biggest question is about views really. I see only two
pages in the docs talking about JX. The flow docs still talk about
possibly using XSP with the JXPath logicsheet. Is XSP still fine to
use since I'm used to it?
My strong advice: forget about XSP. It was nice idea, it worked fine but
everyone moved from it to JX, it's just a fact.
Is JX the way to go? Is Velocity better because it's used in other
projects? I tend to do some pretty complicated logic on the view side
of things (not messing with the model or controller side) and like the
expressiveness of having all of Java at my fingertips, so I'm a little
wary of a restricted template for the view.
Template block (so also JX) has a concept of macros. These are reusable
parts of template customized by data, the are quite powerful. CForms are
pretty complicated and run fine using Templates as view. I don't know
about Velocity, but in Cocoon world Template is going to be primer
template engine.
Also... I've been looking into Spring and Tuscany to help with data
access and exposing web services. Should I try to get started with
Cocoon 2.2?
Spring... Spring + Hibernate alternative way of handling data to that
showed in BricksCMS. It demands more time for learning but it's more
powerful. Also you should know that Spring became default component
container in 2.2 so integration is pretty good and tight. So yes, Spring
is the way to go for the future.
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/BricksCms
http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/Bricks22
[2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.cocoon.devel/65212/focus=65220
Hope that helps a little.
--
Grzegorz Kossakowski
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