Maurice Gittens wrote:
Here's an opinion of a dev that has been lurking on this list for some time.
Excellent, it's really important that we hear views from everyone with
an interest. If we do something radical we have to be sure it is the
right thing to do.
I much appreciate the conceptual design of forrest where a single
internal format is used as the target of input transformations and as the
source of output transformations.
Yes, I agree. This is something that must not change. In fact, if we
make such a radical change on the underlying code then I'm sure we will
also take the opportunity to move to XHTML2, something we've wanted to
do for a long time.
However I agree with Ross that there is much unneeded
complexity involved in using Forrest relative to the functionality it
provides. I currently choose not to debug problems I encounter
in Forrest simply because this entails delving into too many seemingly
overengineered components with not much relevance to the problem
I am trying to solve.
This is precisely what I thought was happening, although we can't assume
you are typical, it would be great to hear from others.
However, it is true that I have also grown tired of fighting to debug
stuff in Forrest. One of the other advantages of moving to a more simple
Java implementation is that we will gain the ability to write unit tests
for each component and test it in isolation of the rest of the system.
Luckily for me, the forrest devs usually quickly fix the problems so that I
don't even have to report them. The fact remains however that I would have
enjoyed giving something back.
This is all to say that I would be happy to contribute to a cleaner
implementation of Forrest.
It's good to hear that you think such a move might help you become more
involved in Forrest. If your case is typical then I'm certain that this
would be a good move, but we need to hear from more people like you to
help us decide what to do.
Ross
