Hi Greg,
sorry for the delay: you will find my reply embedded below.
Regards.
On 02/04/2012 11:00, gelo1234 wrote:
Hello,
We've been using Cocoon framework for years and are very happy with
its simplicity and RAD features.
Although we use very old version of Cocoon (2.0.5), it still satisfies
us.
Unfortunately there are some bugs inside those old framework libs that
we cannot fix as well as some memory leaks
from libraries that are no longer in use. That's why we soon plan to
upgrade to the newest release of Cocoon.
And i have few questions related to that topic:
1. Is C3 stable enough to give it a try in a production ?
Stable enough to give a try? Yes.
Ready for production? No, unless you have enough skills to dive inside
the source code. There are C3-based projects in production out there,
but latest release is alpha [1], and development version is still beta1.
2. Is there any equivalent of XSP in C3 ?
Not really. As you say below, XSP were already deprecated in C2.1.
The only template mechanism available in C3 is StringTemplate [2] which
is way less flexible (and error-prone) than XSP.
The flexibility of XSP is very important to us in terms of introducing
many new/short changes
very fast to our web application. We just make a change and that's all
- cocoon engine recompiles the java-related
class and it is instantly available to us - no recompiling from our
dev team, no deployment, no app server restart no fuss at all!
It allows us for very rapid changes! That's exactly the kind of
flexibility we want to have in our dev environment.
And we were much worried when in next Cocoon releases the support for
XSP was abandoned. As far as i know
XSP became deprecated in C2.1.11 to be totally removed in C2.2.x and i
suppose in C3.
I didn't dig much into all the features of new Cocoon but it seems
like in C2.1/2.2 the best thing to use on the "controller" side
is Flowscript code. We were hesitating to switch from pure Java
controller code to Javascript/Flowscript
code because in my opinion the continuation mechanism is error-prone,
yet the developer must take care of many intricacies
around session/continuation expire times and so on. But the main
reason for us not to go for it was the language -
Javascript - NOT Java. Although if i get it right, you can just
instantiate any Java object and get access to any Java library available
around from Javascript, it is not as much flexible as java was in XSP.
Though it still doesn't require any recompiling!/redeployment phase
from the dev team as i assume.
In C3 you can have Java controllers called and that is Good, but it
does require recompiling the Java
class and redeploy it on the server (and restart app server?). So it
will be much much SLOWER than just dynamic-recompiling by cocoon
engine without any server restart.
So i wonder if there is any mechanism on the controller side available
in C3 that enabled us to still use Java but doesn't require from us
recompiling java code/making redeployment/restarting the application
server ?
Sure: you can empower cocoon-maven-plugin [3] for this, or even setup
something external like JRebel.
3. Is Flowscript using some separate javascript engine like V8 ? Is it
run inside JVM as a dynamic language feature ?
Whats is a preferred method to be used as a logic controller in C3 -
Flowscript or Java ?
There is no support at all for Flowscript / continuations in C3.
4. We don't want to go yet with C3 alpha-3 because it still uses old
Xerces and XML-API libs. We found out there are some issues with those
old libs under Tomcat 7 while working with "bloated" XML namespaces or
handling some SAX errors. They had led to some memory leaks in our
environment.
I spotted on the changelog that you have just updated C3 beta to the
newest Xerces/XML-APIs. Thank you very much for this. I really
appreciate that important change. Can we have some light on when the
beta is released?
Nice question, indeed :-)
I'd suggest to send a separate e-mail about this topic to dev ML.
Regards.
[1] http://cocoon.apache.org/3.0/alpha-warning.html
[2] http://www.stringtemplate.org/
[3]
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/maven-plugins/maven-plugin/1.0/1295_1_1.html
--
Francesco Chicchiriccò
Apache Cocoon PMC and Apache Syncope PPMC Member
http://people.apache.org/~ilgrosso/
