Hello John, On Thursday 27 June 2002 04:41, John Austin wrote: >. . . > After just a few hours of poking around I have decided that it will be > much simpler for me to simply hand-code a whole hat-full of servlets > than to try and pull any meaning out of Cocoon and it's documentation. >. . .
First thanks for expressing yourself on this mailing list, many people might have just quit without saying anything! As is the case with many open-source projects (or any project during its construction phase), I think understanding Cocoon is possible in a few hours, but requires some help from the community. You're right that the documentation is far from perfect at this time, but I think the level of support that you might get by asking focused questions on the mailing lists is way superior to many commercial support offerings. This will usually make up for the lack of consistency or depth of the documentation, although your mileage may vary depending on what components you're asking about (which might also tell you which components are most well-known and/or stable). There also a few books coming out, notably Matthew Langham and Carsten Ziegeler's excellent one [1], which should be available now or shortly. That doesn't answer your concern today but should do so soon. I don't think Cocoon is out-of-control today, it's just being evolved at an incredibly quick pace by a great but loosely-coupled team of developers. Not being able to contribute code today, I'm watching what's going on in amazement and learning a few lessons about why some projects (like Cocoon IMHO) work and others don't.. Keeping up with the pace is hard and you're right that it is hard to find out what you can reasonably use today and what are still moving targets, among the many available components. Hopefully the current documentation effort will make this better, but in the meantime I'm confident that with a little help from the community it is very possible to get a lot of productive work done today with Cocoon! Regards, -- Bertrand Delacrétaz (codeconsult.ch, jfor.org) buzzwords: XML, java, XSLT, cocoon, mentoring/teaching/coding. disclaimer: eternity is very long. mostly towards the end. get ready. [1 ] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735712352/needacake-20 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. <http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html> To unsubscribe, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
