Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

Yes. This is going to be even more with the introduction of the flow since people with client-side knowledge (html + css + javascript + xml + namespace + xslt) will be able to write full-blown web applications with database connectivity *without* a single line of a language they don't know nor understand.

This is potentially *HUGE*. Yet is a community shift that might find *ourselves* not-prepared to stand the flood of those people and their mindsets because most of us don't come from that background and people in that client-side-web background have no notion of SoC, IoC nor any abstract concept like OOP, COP or AOP, nor even the most basic design patterns.

This cultural clash is potentially *very* harmful for both sides if the mindset transition is not done smoothly.

Very clever analysis, which resonates with my view of the evolution of software engineering since Java (or the web ?) appeared. The world of "developpers" is more and more split in two categories those who build components or frameworks, and those who use it. This is nothing new
compared to other domains of the human activity : you have house builders and brick makers, you have electronic device designers and chip makers, etc.

I usually call it 'separation of concerns', even heard of it? :)


And Cocoon offers so high-level abstractions that people can use it without caring about what's going on under the hood, even not caring about Java.

Well, almost without caring, since Cocoon is sometimes a leaky abstraction [1] ;-)

eheh, true :)


- they may be installing java for the first time, which (because of sun's windows installer) may have no idea what JAVA_HOME is or should be. They'll need to know this regardless, we just have to add even this to the list of hurdles they already need to jump.



for windows, the sun's installer copies java.exe in the PATH, so we need to have them set JAVA_HOME *ONLY* if there is no java.exe available in path.



Be careful : what sun's installer copies into the PATH is a *JRE* and not a JDK, which means you have no compiler. So they will end up with something like "NoClassDefFoundError: com.sun.javac.Main" :-(


A solution can be for Cocoon to use one of the compilers it's shipped with. Don't know if it's feasible, though.

Hmmm, writing our own javac task that extends the ant-shipped javac and uses eclipse JDT shouldn't be hard at all.


<snip/>

I think this is YAGNI.


You like this acronym, eh ? ;-)

Yes, I love it :)


I say: let's start incrementally: we build one well-done build.sh-driven distro and see what is the user reaction. *then* move from there.

What do you think?

If we can solve the JAVA_HOME issue, then +0.

What do others think?


Stefano.


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