Hi
On 26 May 2005, at 14:42, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Do you see a point where they'll be
able to put together semi-complex webapps in LEGO style?
Dude, can you read?
http://cocoon.apache.org/ [very first paragraph]
Patently I cannot ;-)
[nobody is responding because that's like asking: do you see a future
of
open source for this project? WTF man!?!]
See, actually, my question (which admittedly could be much better put)
is:
What -kind- of a future do you see, in concrete terms, for Cocoon
blocks being deployed for a non-programmer (not even XML confs) user
who has no intention of actually meeting Cocoon at all?
It's not an informed question, its a journalistic question; humble
apologies for not pre-emptying with 'consider first that I don't know
what I'm talking 'bout' ;-)
Secondly, if you were to think much further ahead in the future, do
you
see agent-driven applications calling containers which might or might
not call Cocoon components into a user's 'Webapp Building' tool? Does
the work Stefano is carrying out at MIT (Simile, PiggyBank) make you
think of emergent people processing, whereby people might be able to
use
Firefox to build web applications, by having the browser enquire RDF
repositories for the right components and their dependencies?
Honestly, the whole thing has more the flavor of sci-fi or VC-oriented
BS than any real technology (see below)
Again, I realise I should have clarified. Imagine a Higher Education
body saying 'Cocoon is -not- as easy to use for HE developers as it
advertises it is. Do you see it becoming easier with time, and how?'.
Those guys want to know more about your thoughts for the future.
At no point does this have anything to do with either VCs, or sci-fi
for that matter. It's simply a report for a publicly-funded research
body, on how the people building frameworks like Cocoon see the future.
Let me very very clear here: *do not* confuse these questions as
anything other than questions related to a JISC report. It has been
commissioned by Lesley Hawkins (JISC executive, [EMAIL PROTECTED])
and Paul Anderson from Techwatch ([EMAIL PROTECTED]),
who works for JISC. They have no intention of this report being used to
do anything but inform their channels (FE and HE developers and senior
decision makers) about available technology.
Of course, when I write about it, it sounds like sci-fi bullshit. It
does so because my questions are naive. But don't let that put you off
answering the question (I see below, it didn't).
people are talking about agents, but how is an agent different than a
program? My spam filter saves me hours every single day, it's a very
complex beast and achieves impressive results (better than me, for
sure). Is that an agent? In the "it's working for you sense" it is, if
it's spamassassin, it's also downloading information from the network
to
fulfill its task.
Completely agree. My definition of 'agency' (including its component
agents) has nothing to do with AI. Too much heuristic emphasis has been
put on the word agency in the past. I simply mean 'a learning program
which purports to help a human achieve successful completion of a
task'. The only reason I see whereby you would call this program and
'agent', is because like a human helper, it learns overtime. Nothing
more sci-fi than that.
Agents and web services are fancy names to describe stuff that we have
been doing since the days the concept of 'client-server' was born. We
are moving into describing the borders of this concepts in a more
precise way, mostly by specifying more on the data being transfered and
the nature of the service interaction, but at the end, it's the same
architectural concept.
Again, no discussion there.
Firefox extensions contain RDF that indicates where they come from,
their version and so on. So, in a sort of way, Firefox is a lego-like
semantic agent. But again, that's BS, it's just the way they do things,
not necessarely the only way to achieve the same functionality.
But, a way which is -working- right now. I'm much more interested in
hearing your thoughts on feasibility than whether the wording is
correct. To my mind, a piano has been working as a tool for players for
the last 400 years. The discussion on how to better the tool hasn't
ended. Its become more granular and therefore less visible to
outsiders.
We could write the cocoon blocks metadata in RDF (I would suggest we do
so, but not now), but if the cocoon kernel doesn't support easy
installation, that doesn't buy us anything.
That's what I'm after. So you see a roadmap whereby first you work on
easy kernel installation -then- play semantics.
Your dream are not wild at all, btw, they are actually very moderate,
the lego-like approach has been in my vision of cocoon since before
cocoon even started (it was the vision behind avalon). As for automatic
deployment of blocks, again, this was in our vision for avalon already
in 1998, but never managed to get it bootstrapped (and we still
struggle
with that here for cocoon blocks).
Where do you think the struggle to achieve automatic block deployment
resides? (again, please take this question as journalistic vs.
informed)
What I think it's pure BS is the idea that the general population will
use Firefox to build web applications. There is a huge cognitive
difference between seeing your client adapt to your needs, and instruct
it to do so. The second approach is something only a small percentage
of
the general population has interest in doing.
Ok I getcha. However, the second approach, and its small percentage of
interested parties is -exactly- the audience of this JISC report. They
don't necessarily want to know whether they'll be able to build webapps
through Firefox. They just wonder whether they'll be able to see
Historians, Musicians, Anthropologists and Librarians build webapps
without having to understand XML configuration files, or get involved
in the nature of the framework delivering the components to build those
webapps.
My remit for this report is to answer as clearly as I can as to whether
that is very far in the future or perhaps not as far as they think.
And the generation of that HTML might be a result (as in piggy-bank) of
complex, client side operations on a more sofisticated memory model of
the data. In fact, my next task for Piggy-bank is to find a way to
allow
'user selectable' views of your data (we call those "lenses"), and
there
has been a huge discussion about the feasibility of this approach
declaratively on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list about the
Fresnel RDF presentation ontology (fresnel, lenses, got it?) (find more
at http://simile.mit.edu/fresnel/)
Can you see piggy banks being used by applications other than Firefox?
(I assume because it relies on RDF, Firefox is simple the tool you're
using for its -present- form, and that anything people write that can
speak and interact with RDF stores will be able to talk to it).
Yes, the vision is that the user will get more power having to do less,
but this is the vision of pretty much any reasonable technology.
Is not the "what" that counts here (that's the easy part), it's the
"how". And believe me, nobody really has any clue of what is going to
work or what is going to fail miserably (that's why is called
'research')
And my commission here is to inform a research agency (JISC) about your
research and that of everyone involved in Cocoon development. Nothing
more.
Sorry if that got your back up.
Its a bit like asking a football manager 'so do you think you'll win
the League this year?'.
In the end, Stefano, it isn't as imbecile a question as you appear to
think.
Let me put it again in a more straightforward manner : when I introduce
people to Cocoon in JISC projects, I usually train people who are
already developers. Their 'project managers' sit back, unaware even of
the topic, precisely because they've hired programmers to help them
create whatever webapp/repository/foobarPortal for their research
discipline. The gap between the two is abismal; Cocoon goes a LONG way
towards closing that gap already, and everyone hopes it will go
further. Could you comment on where you'd like make progress to bridge
the gap between researchers and programmers when building applications
for the web, and how you think you'll go about it?
This isn't a commercial, VC-led, vampiric question, Stefano. I don't
have any intention of packaging Cocoon or making nice little shiny toys
with it. I'll leave people with more time and money and less worries
than me to do that. Its a question from researchers just like you, but
from different disciplines (mainly the Humanities), who are hoping the
tools you guys build will get easier to use with time, and would love
to now when, how, etc.
See?
Thanks for the reply though, goes a long way towards at least letting
me know how you feel about it all.
Ciao,
David
--
David Plans Casal, Director of Research, Luminas Internet Applications
Tel: +44 (0)870 741 6658 Fax: +44 (0)700 598 1135
Web: www.luminas.co.uk Orixo alliance: http://www.orixo.com/
