I counted eighteen +1s and no other votes, welcome Alfred!
-Bertrand
With my account in the works, it's time to introduce myself.
I am team leader of Internet Service Development at SWX Swiss Exchange. Our business unit SWX e-Services (current staff 18, half of them developers) is in charge of the corporate websites of SWX and a number of related companies. Our expertise lies in the processing of stock quotes and other financial data.
In the old days we have been using mainly Perl CGIs and scripts for the generation of dynamic content. Beginning of 2002 I started looking at Cocoon. After a successful pilot to integrate a new Cocoon-based application into the existing website, Java and Cocoon became our technology of choice for all new developments. In the meantime more than 80% of our content volume, including the two biggest sites www.swx.com and www.eurexchange.com, are Cocoon-based, and the rest is scheduled to follow.
For us XSP is still a key technology and I am hesitating to go the flowscript way for various reasons. With my SWX hat on the committership is therefore an important instrument to make sure that the XSP block stays production quality, even if declared legacy by the Cocoon avantgarde. Another professional itch is to optimize multi-threaded performance on 4-8 CPU servers.
Among the more personal interests I hope to combine with Cocoon during
my copious sparetime are Relax NG (to fight the evil XML Schema moloch),
findbugs (to fight bugs which should not be), and automatic unit tests
(to fight those annoying regressions).
As non-committer I was always wondering at the long list of [PATCH] entries in Bugzilla. Now I better have a closer look whether I can't do something about that myself.
Anyway, thanks to all you guys for creating Cocoon which makes my daytime job so much more interesting. I hope I am up to contributing to it a bit myself now.
Cheers, Alfred.
Alfred, welcome!
My simple advice: don't be shy. We really want committer to feel at home on the cocoon tree and given the amazing abilities of complete version control, there is no damage that can't be promptly restored, so don't worry about making mistakes or breaking things as you go, we are all very friendly about all those things :-)
All your above goals are very much in line with the 'conservative' side of our user base, which I'm sure will see your presence as a renewed injection of solidity in cocoon's foundations and this is very good.
At the end of the day, I can't stop being amazed, even after so many years, of how healthy and diverse our community is, showing that there are ways to merge innovation with contract solidity.
Again, welcome on board.
-- Stefano.
