Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
:) Sounds good to me. Now what do you think of using the
things from
Avalon that are good (for us)? Now, I think, some of the interfaces (for logging, contextualization, initialization) are good
and we could
directly use them instead of building just a clone of them.
There are two issues here, Carsten. One is about the present and another is about the future. Present indicates that reusing what's available is great, future indicates that if we keep dependencies on
org.apache.avalon.* namespace we either end up forking it or, more likely, we have potential classloading collision issues in the future with things that avalon might produce.
remember the rhino classloading problem with weblogic? same thing.
Sure.
I strongly suggest that we start with org.apache.cocoon.* to avoid these problems down the road (including, yes, gump problems)
Yes, I understand of course all these problems, but I'm really afraid
of changing all the components now from Avalon interfaces to Cocoon
interfaces which are more or less the same but just use a different
package. In that case these components run in Cocoon but not in any
other container anymore that provides Avalon compatibility. And
that's imho bad. Not every project uses Cocoon, so it's absolutely preferable to have components that I can use in several projects.
Ok, I think if we decide to use our own versions of the interfaces it will still be possible to do some hacky things and still provide compatilibity with the Avalon versions.
So what do others think?
I'm under the impression that this is very rare. The constant fracturing of the container wars has to have made true interoperability very hard to achieve. Are you saying that you have specific projects which use components across containers?
Existing components ought to be supported by the proposed avalon compatibility block. Maybe new/updated components which need to interoperate with other blocks in Cocoon and with other containers could be constructed carefully to be valid components in both worlds. A pain, but the universe of people who are likely to use both cocoon and other avalon components has to be a pretty small and capable group.
If this doesn't seem possible in your case, let's think about why and weigh our options.
Geoff
