Steven Noels wrote:
On 17 Dec 2004, at 10:13, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
It would be nice if there was a place where the latest release would be
running, so everyone could check it out. I know this requires cleaning up
the crap that some people think they should enter, but that might be done
through some simple scripts.
It would also give future users the change to have a look at Cocoon before
doing the actual download. And newbies can verify if they have done things
correctly because they can compare their own version with "THE" live
version.
I know server hosting will be a problem, but maybe it's running somewhere
already which could be made available to "the world"?
FWIW, this has been running on cocoon.cocoondev.org for more than two years, but I pulled it down due to lack of hits. Similarly, I will be dropping the webmail.cocoondev.org demo soonish.
Well, lack of hits doesn't meen lack of interest, but maybe more lack of advertising (AFAIK, these demos weren't mentioned on the Apache website).
The problem is that we've always been more or less reluctant to link from the ASF cocoon website to resources hosted "elsewhere". Even the wiki. That's something we should fix, and a live demo with due advertising on the website front page would certainly have more visitors.
Now for sure it would be good if it could be hosted by the ASF infrastructure.
I had a Cocoon BOF two days ago at JavaPolis. I spoke to quite a few folks during the conference as well, which know how we (as a company) have been pushing people to use Cocoon over the past three years.
With all due respect, I think there's only a few things we should care to work on to give Cocoon more chances for success. I know there were many success stories lately, but we should be realistic as well: the world is looking into a shift from Struts to JSF, and that's about all they care. People still perceive Cocoon as a big, complicated, scary beast.
Funnily, I recently had a private chat after my recent blog entry about Struts [1] with Stephane Bailliez (Ant & Maven committer) which told me more or less the same.
Some recurring complaints were:
* documentation (oh well)
* cohesive direction (as in: _only_ explain folks about things like the power trio, and make sure these things work flawlessly, and stop being hesitant about deprecation and removal of alternatives)
* prune, prune, prune: make blocks separately downloadable, and drop blocks which aren't supported nor used
* make sure people don't need a bit of everything to build a decent Cocoon app (as in: some Actions, some Input modules, some Javascript, some Java, a bit of CForms, a choice over various O/R efforts, some Springkles here and there, and so on and so forth)
The last one doesn't mean people shouldn't use all this, it's just that all this is now perceived as totally separated, isolated, unrelated and incohesively documented stuff.
I can only agree with this.
The JBoss folks were right when they told me over drinks that Cocoon is too much of a research project.
Yes, but that's also because of its we-don't-have-to-respect-a-JSR nature which allows more creativity.
Just to give an example: JXTG isn't even used massively (too many folks still stuck with XSPs), and already we start chatting about JXTG-NG. How should users believe we actually care about them? (= literal remark I got yesterday!)
Mmmh... JXTG-NG has a dual purpose:
- refactor the complicated code we have today into something more maintainable. Similar to what happened in the CForms transformer
- pave the way for *the* dynamic template generator, just as CForms deprectated XMLForm.
end-of-rant
Thanks for it :-)
Sylvain
[1] http://www.anyware-tech.com/blogs/sylvain/archives/000153.html
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
