...Frankly, I'd love to see how this will even work. If someone could explain how the cron block can be a block without exposing components then maybe I could understand. I really want to understand how this could apply to the portal block, but the cron block is a lot simpler...
Reading these discussions after the fact, having Blocks provide only sitemap components seems to make a lot of sense: it looks immediately useful, understandable and Cocoon-specific, whereas yet another (potentially complicated) general java component mechanism sounds a lot like reinventing the wheel (I'm overly simplifying here).
About cron and similar blocks (JMS, embedded database server, etc.): thinking of them as unix "daemons" might help fit them nicely in the concept. Conceptually, I think such blocks need an initialization mechanism, a reconfiguration interface (Transformer?) and a status interface (Generator).
Basing the blocks concept on sitemap components (the grep sed ps ls awk sort of Cocoon) and "daemon components" (the cron mysql sendmail of Cocoon) might help find the right balance here.
-Bertrand
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