Thanks for the honest words, instead of silence. I am reminded of the following definition:
" second-system effect n. When one is designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". It described the jump from a set of nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360 series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see Brooks's Law, creeping elegance, creeping featurism." http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/second-system-effect.html The choice is to stick around and help fix things (if indeed they are broken), or jump to a lighter alternative like Maverick: "Maverick is a minimalist web publishing framework which combines the best features of Struts and Cocoon and yet is far simpler than either." http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=velocity-user&m=102387923624439&w=2 --Jeff On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 10:41:14PM -0400, John Austin wrote: > I'm back from a short vacation in beautiful Chicago (it really is much > nicer than Toronto or Montreal) and have waded back in to Cocoon for a > couple of days. > > 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. > Fifteen hours on the Interstate wasn't as challenging as trying to > figure out how one should check a Web Form this month but I didn't have > that feeling of travelling backwards half of the time. I was also able > to predict and achieve forward progress (for a change). > > Thanks guys, but no thanks. > > Maybe I'm getting old, but I really don't understand the need for all > of the complexity and the lack of documentation in this product. > > On the other hand, I used to feel the same way about the mind-numbing > complexity of a certain thirty-year-old mainframe operating system > (MVS) produced by IBM back in the sixties and it's patching system > (SMP4). So it can't just be my age. > > Anyway, Cocoon has cost me far morte (a typo that's better than the > original word) time than it was worth. The chief problems appear to > have been endlessly re-invented terminology for an overwhelming number > of 'new concepts' and a complete lack of consistency between different > components (i.e. functional code, non-functional examples, unbuildable > documentation and a website that doesn't match up with any single > released version of the project). > > I have a lot of respect for the ability of the people who have built > this project, but I want them to know that their project appears to be > out-of-control and could become very difficult to manage. If > experienced developers (like myself) can't figure out how to use enough > features in the product to make it worth using, then penetration will > be limited and all of your efforts will be wasted. There is more to > this business than stuffing in features at the expense of documentation > and testing. You have a lot of very good ideas, but the execution of > the project as a whole seems to be suffering. > > I know that I will often look at my JSP and servlet code and think 'XSP > and Cocoon were sooo much better!' until I remember that I wasn't ever > able to use enough of Cocoon to make a profit. > > Oh, well, at least all of my test systems have bags of memory now! > --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]>