One day I hope the anti-flow/pro-action people will simply stop sneaking doubts and come up with real arguments on why we shouldn't heavily bet on the flow.
I thought we were done with this balkanization thing, didn't we? I for one have just finished my first tiny flow-based application, and while I still find the edge layer where Java & Javascript meet each other quite murky, I had good fun while hacking on it. It's not about just black & white, Stefano.
<dreaming>
What I would like to see, even if some of it might be nonsense, is a seriously integrated scripting environment to code the behaviour of a webapp, and flowscript is a nice way to start exploring that concept. With serious, I mean there should be a way to work with persistency, security, and back-end business logic without this stupid Packages thing, and, because of the continuous bouncing back & forward between Java and JS, not having to worry about the automagic typecasting that happens on the border between Java & Javascript.
Syntax-wise, I have about the same problem with JS as I have with Java, but that's because I find Python a tad more readible. There's people around here that would rather like to code flow in real Java, with dynamic recompilation and all that. There's room for diversity, and we should exploit that. Even Apples hooks in with the flow at some point. <aside>And Apples doesn't mean anything more to me than a personal adventure of a guy I like, on the same level of appreciation that Dywel has in my mind: nothing wrong with it, but where's the community?</aside>
We should work on serious JS-wrapping of services typically used in webapps, and extensive Avalonization of existing Cocoon code can help with that. There should be formalization of the border area between Java & JS, or we will kill ourselves with recurring user questions about the lack of explicit semantics & casting.
Over time, I still hope that some Jython guru will pop up and make all this also possible using a language I've come to appreciate above JS, but that's entirely IMHO.
</dreaming>
Of course, if we start from a discours of "either you're with us, or you're against us", well, all this might take a long time to happen. As much as you repeatedly come back on this so-called split between pro and contra, I'm quite sure that you are currently misguiding yourself (and through such remarks, also this community) about this so-called polarization. For myself, I started hating overweight sitemaps a long time ago. I'm also pretty sure some of the old action-farts will be amongst the people who, eventually, will make sure flowscript reaches the same level of robustness, documentation and user support that the 'old stuff' already has.
Oh, and I did read the rest of your mail, and you were right about AAA, interceptors and flow. I understand now. Thanks for your repeated efforts in educating the clueless. ;-D
Cheers,
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
