I've just committed [experimental] changes that provide a simple database API for the Cocoon flow layer modeled after JSTL
[...]
Let me know what you think.
OK, first of all I must confess that I have little or no experience with the flow, so probably I should just shut up and let you guys proceed with your impressive work, eagerly waiting to have some time to catch up and join the party.
This said, I just wanted to share a couple of "belly thoughts", since the recent additions to the flow are ringing a bell in my head, and I start getting a bit puzzled. One of the first concerns we had when we started talking about flow was about people abusing it and how to stop them. The answer has always been that the flow would have played the role of "pure glue", providing, well, flow control and little more: in particular it was take for granted that the business objects would have been outside of the flow scope.
Now, this database addition makes me think that we are approaching the "all purpose" scenario (who said that every application must grow until it's able to connecto to a database? :-)), with a lot of possible (user) abuses (I perfectly understand that users will abuse it nevertheless, I just don't want to help them too much in that).
Please understand me: I might well be wrong with this, since I'm not seeing the whole picture... I'm just feeling that there might be something wrong here. Basically I don't see the reason for having specialized flow components that are somehow duplicating Cocoon ones (take Velocity as an example): if I'm not able to use Cocoon components inside the flow (better: if using Cocoon components is hard enough to make duplication a viable option) then I'm wondering if we aren't going sooner or later to crash against a wall.
Anyway, take this as an old aunt rant, just 0.02c of random thought from an almost complete ignorant. And, of course, thank you for the great job you have been doing until now: I surely hope to join the next discussions with a more thorough knowledge of what's going on under the hood.
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino Pro-netics s.r.l. http://www.pro-netics.com
