From: Sylvain Wallez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:00:59 +0200
Joerg Heinicke wrote:
> On 17.08.2006 01:29, Torsten Curdt wrote:
>
>>> "Is it appropriate to vote according to your employer's needs".
>>
>> IMO PMC members should vote in the best interest of the project - not
>> in the best interest of their employers.
>
> I just want to point out that I did not vote "according to [my]
> employer's needs", but what IMHO is better for the project. Though we
> do not yet use Java 5, there is probably no problem to switch to it.
> The example I made with the bank was with a former employer of mine.
Folks, this discussion considers the problem from the wrong perspective.
Large IT departments don't bother upgrading their environments unless
there's a compelling reason to do that,
Oh, we already have a compelling reason - Websphere 5.0's end-of-lifed at
the end of next month. Unfortunately, I was informed by the team that looks
after the servers that they hadn't finished testing a newer version (and had
found some issues with it affecting some of our apps that would need to be
fixed before they'd sign it off) and were negotiating with IBM to continue
supporting the older version for us in the meantime. And we're big enough
that they'll probably do it :-(
and if we listen to them, we'll
never move forward. Now being told "the new version of the application
needs the great things brought by the new Cocoon, but requires Java 1.5"
can be such an incentive for them. Even if I don't think people
frightened by the migration from Java 1.4 (or 1.3) to 1.5 will even
consider migrating from Cocoon 2.1 to 2.2.
If only life were that simple. Personally, I'd love to switch to 1.5, and
in fact am using it on my "spare time" projects at home. But I have no
influence on which version to use at work - if our site it to be hosted on
the robust, scalable infrastructure in the US datacentre, then we have to
code to the server that they support. For internal apps it's another
matter, but for internet sites we're stuck with the "group standard"
platform. If I argue "but Cocoon needs 1.5", they'll just tell me I should
instead migrate our app to the proprietary web app framework we inherited in
a takeover a while back, and which is supported & maintained by yet another
team over in the States. I only get to use Cocoon (which is a much better
fit with our CMS, that uses XML-based data records) because they also
support bare servlets/JSPs and we told them it's "just" an XML processing
servlet :-)
It is IMO our role, as technology builders, to invite our users to
progress towards more modern stuff. What's the purpose of Sun releasing
a new JDK? What's the reason for Cocoon to release 2.2? What's the
reason to upgrade to the latest Xalan? What's the reason for Struts to
start with a blank page learning from the oldish Struts 1.x and Webwork?
Providing more to users, providing something that works better,
providing something that brings more development productivity.
There's a difference between "inviting users to progress towards more modern
stuff" and forcing them to leap to the cutting edge, though. What's wrong
with one step at a time? JDK 1.3 for Cocoon 2.1.x, JDK 1.4 for Cocoon 2.2,
JDK 1.5 for Cocoon 3 or 2.3 or whatever the next version gets called?
One of the good things about Cocoon (IMO) is that it cares about backwards
compatibility - 2.1.x requires only java 1.3 and servlet 2.2 so will run on
just about anything. There was a recent vote to move trunk/2.2 to servlet
2.4, justified by Tomcat 5.0 being available since 2003; since Tomcat 5.0
requires JDK 1.4 or later, why not keep in line with that? If you're going
to switch to 1.5 just because it's the current version, you might as well go
the whole hog and jump to servlet 2.5/J2EE 5 too...
All this discussion makes me sad, as it gives the impression the overall
Cocoon developer community doesn't want to move forward and is
frightened by moves that would cause some disruption among _some_ users.
Not so much frightened as that they care, and not only want to move forward
but bring existing users forward with them. At least, that's the impression
I receive.
Note also that the poll on the user list showed an evident interest in
using JDK 1.5...
If I remember rightly, the summary that was posted here a couple of days ago
was that 9 users said it wouldn't be a problem for them. Count me as 1
against that and extrapolate, and we could conclude jumping to 1.5 is a
problem for 10% of your users. Given the statistical error on such a small
sample size, I could probably come up with figures to prove it
inconveniences anything between one user and most of the user base. But
that's what a couple of years studying statistics gets you :-)
Andrew.
