RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Thanks for the reply. I still, however, cant figure out how to get a hello world working on a clean war without all of the other crap in the cocoon war. Robert, It seems you really have two requirements for Cocoon: 1) learning how to create a simple Cocoon app; 2) learning how to build a minimal Cocoon distribution that doesn't require all the JARs for deployment in order that you can deploy Cocoon multiple times without duplicating the libraries each time. It's not clear why you want to combine these two steps? We ran Cocoon here for almost 8 months before we worried about getting a minimal Cocoon image (when we finally cleaned things up we went from a 12MB EAR to a 5 MB EAR, much of which is our own code). In the mean time we wasted some disk space but no development time... You are right that Cocoon is not easy to pick up and use for deploying a simple application. That's not what it was designed for. Cocoon is designed for making it easy to manage complex data sets and/or complex web based user interfaces. If all you want is a simple front end then likely you don't have a requirement to use Cocoon - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
For what it's worth, I walked through the steps for building the minimal war he was looking for on Saturday, sent him the binary war (5 meg) and posted the steps on the wiki. He's already written a first custom generator that connects to his ejbs and seems much happier now. He's started to refer to cocoon as we! :) Some of that happened off list, so I thought it worth sending in a quick update. I do agree, Peter that many people will not see a need right away to strip things out, but a great point that Robert made is that the flip side of keeping the expanse of possibilities visible to a new user is that it's quite difficult to figure out what's essential and what's not: especially for the ejb world where logic and data access are already well encapsulated. Geoff -Original Message- From: Hunsberger, Peter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 11:04 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma Thanks for the reply. I still, however, cant figure out how to get a hello world working on a clean war without all of the other crap in the cocoon war. Robert, It seems you really have two requirements for Cocoon: 1) learning how to create a simple Cocoon app; 2) learning how to build a minimal Cocoon distribution that doesn't require all the JARs for deployment in order that you can deploy Cocoon multiple times without duplicating the libraries each time. It's not clear why you want to combine these two steps? We ran Cocoon here for almost 8 months before we worried about getting a minimal Cocoon image (when we finally cleaned things up we went from a 12MB EAR to a 5 MB EAR, much of which is our own code). In the mean time we wasted some disk space but no development time... You are right that Cocoon is not easy to pick up and use for deploying a simple application. That's not what it was designed for. Cocoon is designed for making it easy to manage complex data sets and/or complex web based user interfaces. If all you want is a simple front end then likely you don't have a requirement to use Cocoon - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
For what it's worth, I walked through the steps for building the minimal war he was looking for on Saturday, sent him the binary war (5 meg) and posted the steps on the wiki. He's already written a first custom generator that connects to his ejbs and seems much happier now. He's started to refer to cocoon as we! :) Some of that happened off list, so I thought it worth sending in a quick update. Yes, I saw that. I'm only now catching up with the 280 e-mails I had this morning: that's what I get for being off-line all weekend; new baby girl at home, who has time for computers :-) I do agree, Peter that many people will not see a need right away to strip things out, but a great point that Robert made is that the flip side of keeping the expanse of possibilities visible to a new user is that it's quite difficult to figure out what's essential and what's not: especially for the ejb world where logic and data access are already well encapsulated. Really the biggest issue for me as a new Cocoon users was the sitemap; you get told to look at the sitemap since everything is controlled by the sitemap. Then, once you look at the sitemap you wonder what the heck is ALL this stuff? A WAR packed full of tons of JARS I can ignore, but Cocoon isn't going to do me much good unless I can comprehend the sitemap. The flip side top this is that if you have a minimal sitemap then there is no good way to learn the features of Cocoon incrementally. Once you've got things working with Cocoon what is going to make you look at other Coccon components to see if you can extend things with Cocoon instead of re-inventing the wheel? You spend a bit of time looking, but there is so much to look at it's often easier to just incrementally add to your own code one bit at a time. Next thing you know you've reinvented the Castor transformer (or whatever)... - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
-Original Message- From: Hunsberger, Peter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 12:43 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma For what it's worth, I walked through the steps for building the minimal war he was looking for on Saturday, sent him the binary war (5 meg) and posted the steps on the wiki. He's already written a first custom generator that connects to his ejbs and seems much happier now. He's started to refer to cocoon as we! :) Some of that happened off list, so I thought it worth sending in a quick update. Yes, I saw that. I'm only now catching up with the 280 e-mails I had this morning: that's what I get for being off-line all weekend; new baby girl at home, who has time for computers :-) I can imagine! My wife is looking at me strange after spending all weekend writing some of those 280! Congratulations on the new baby girl by the way. I do agree, Peter that many people will not see a need right away to strip things out, but a great point that Robert made is that the flip side of keeping the expanse of possibilities visible to a new user is that it's quite difficult to figure out what's essential and what's not: especially for the ejb world where logic and data access are already well encapsulated. Really the biggest issue for me as a new Cocoon users was the sitemap; you get told to look at the sitemap since everything is controlled by the sitemap. Then, once you look at the sitemap you wonder what the heck is ALL this stuff? A WAR packed full of tons of JARS I can ignore, but Cocoon isn't going to do me much good unless I can comprehend the sitemap. The flip side top this is that if you have a minimal sitemap then there is no good way to learn the features of Cocoon incrementally. Once you've got things working with Cocoon what is going to make you look at other Coccon components to see if you can extend things with Cocoon instead of re-inventing the wheel? You spend a bit of time looking, but there is so much to look at it's often easier to just incrementally add to your own code one bit at a time. Next thing you know you've reinvented the Castor transformer (or whatever)... I agree. My feeling (and I think Robert to a degree) is that the benefit of the minimal build with an almost empty sitemap is only alongside something else that shows the full range of possibilities. I'm not sure that something else should always be the sitemap - the docs may be a better place but am not sure if they have kept up with the info in the sitemap. Geoff - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Hunsberger, Peter wrote: Yes, I saw that. I'm only now catching up with the 280 e-mails I had this morning: that's what I get for being off-line all weekend; new baby girl at home, who has time for computers :-) Congrats! /Steven -- Steven Noelshttp://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog athttp://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.orgstevenn at apache.org - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
First of all, I generally agree with you Robert. 1. Cocoon is overly daunting at first sight. 2. MS get you going much faster. 3. Separation between User and Developer must be stronger. 4. Point-Click deployment tools should become a priority. There are a few things I don't agree with; 1. I downloaded Cocoon for the first time in 2years in binary form and dropped the ready-made cocoon.war into Tomcat (also default config). Worked straight out of the box, although the docs suggested otherwise. Since I was involved in discussing the sitemap concept in the first place, I knew how that mechanism work, and was within an hour able to publish my first document. 2. Everything can not be learnt in 10 minutes. I bet you spent a few weeks before mastering Java. How long for XML? Or why not the MS friendly Excel? Certain things takes time, Cocoon is one where you probably need to invest time. You talk about real business. And I do real business, no paycheck, no security, only what I produce. The matter of fact, investments are almost always upfront expenditure for long-term returns, a.k.a Return-On-Investment (ROI). Sometimes expressed in time, even for money. I invest $100,000, ROI=2years, meaning from now until 24months it has cost more than it returned, after that it is profit. You do it all the time. Learn new things to be more productive. Why waste the time? It's up to you. 3. 61MB download is a problem??? The dozens of CDs that MSDN consists of is not? Try to download them, or a portion of it. What is the footprint of dotNet? Downloadable? I don't know, but I doubt it. In fact, when I was shouting about the trouble to install Cocoon in the old days, requiring 10 separate downloads from almost as many sources, I was told that the bundle would be too big. I'm happy that people reconsidered it. Finally, There are efforts going on to improve the separation, and you come back in a year, and you will be able to create and deploy COBs (just learnt it) as easy as a WAR, and no need to see, hear or smell internals of Cocoon. I feel you have passed judgement already, but I recommend you to make it a preliminary injunction, and re-evaluate your position, especially when you have a weekend to invest. It should take much more... Niclas On Sunday 26 January 2003 10:47, Robert Simmons wrote: Robert Simmons dijo: No professional dev wants, or has the time, to blow 2 to three weeks just to get separation of logic and presentation. How you think a Professional developer do that? I ended my Master Degree in Computer Science in 1995 just before Java hits the streets and Windows 95 was just at beta release? How do you think I am here now? Too high of a price for too little gain. Please if you said that phrase you dont really understand what is in the game. I recommend you to check how this little grain affect totally the Web machinery at all. I recommend you to read the second chapter of the Carsten Matthew book: XML: Building XML Applications. You can find it at amazon.com Well, I dont think you understand the pressures in professional circles to meet deadlines. In the open source world, you have all the time in the world to screw with things. When using a product in a working business deadlines get in the way of doing things the right way. This is an explanation of why .NET has been successful. Its a cheap piece of garbage, but its easy to get started. Noone wants to be an expert in 10 hours but they at leat want to have somethign of a clue. Powerful? I believe you. I believe its powerful. Scalable? I don't know. Scalable? Please, just check JBoss.org and answer yourself the question. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me from the IBM site (which was done in cocoon) was taking 10 to 15 seconds per page to render. This is an issue for your computer and/or Internet connection. I dont knwo the cuase but it isnt my isp. I live in Managua, Nicaragua. Maybe it is so far that you dont know where is it. But the wiki takes me less that 3 secs. Of course I use Red Hat Linux 8.0 and Mozilla that is faster than MS IE. Sometimes I go down and use a Windows machine, but I always use Mozilla, because it is faster. Check http://www.mozilla.org Great. You like mozilla. Do me a favor and go out there and convince all the bluechip companies to switch. You may not like microsoft but in a business world you have to deal with it. Whether that is bad or good is irrlevant. Put that in production and your company can kiss sales goodbye. Internet users are impatient and any guy with a DSL isn't going to wait 15 seconds for your page. This is a developers issue, not a Cocoon issue. There are many books related about web design. How to improve performance using CSS, etc. Take a look at that technology and tell me how slow it is. What CSS has to do with my question is beyond me. User friendly?
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
First off I made some suggestions to your
questions/problems below...skip ahead if you don't
want my commentary on Cocoon.
Well it seems to me that when I started with Cocoon, I
was hoping to jump right on in. Unfortunately, it was
not that easy, but not b/c of Cocoon, rather my
limited knowledge of xpath and xsl functions. Anyway,
I tackled these problems by studying the applications
samples packaged with cocoon and reading the
documentation. It may be discouraging, but anything
worthwhile can't be done overnight, right? Anyway, as
I work more and more with Cocoon, I am amazed by the
genius of it's architecture. Cocoon is certainly a
tribute to Open Source and the greatness of those out
there working on and contributing to it. Stick to it
and you will be repaid.
It seems if you have a servlet working, you must be
looking to upgrade. So you should not be looking for
an overnight solution, which is easy with all the
options out there. Overall, the advice I can give is
you must consider:
1)Are you going to use Cocoon for more than just a
replacement for your servlet?
2)What technologies do you want to use: XSP,XSLT,etc.
3)You do not need to build from the CVS source, you
can just download a pre-built version from the site
(nightly or major release)
http://xml.apache.org/dist/cocoon/
4)You may not need to create a new transformer, but
perhaps just make an action.
http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/userdocs/concepts/actions.html
5)You prob need a minimal sitemap(see below) to match
your url requests to your data. No need to worry
about the endless options now. The beauty is you will
learn them as you go and find that Cocoon has almost
everything you could ever need.
6)Look over the user's guide and study some of the
sitemaps packages with Cocoon.
I hope this makes some sense. If not, I 'm sorry, but
I feel as if Cocoon is a great way to go if you want
to do more than just replace your serlvlet. With all
the users, developers, wiki, documentation, and
mailing lists...you will almost always get an answer.
Whether or not it makes sense ;-) ! I attached a
basic sitemap to get you going...
-Julian
?xml version=1.0?
map:sitemap
xmlns:map=http://apache.org/cocoon/sitemap/1.0;
!-- === Components
=== --
map:components
map:generators default=file/
map:transformers default=xslt/
map:readers default=resource/
map:serializers default=html
map:serializer logger=sitemap.serializer.xml
mime-type=text/xml name=xml
src=org.apache.cocoon.serialization.XMLSerializer/
map:serializer logger=sitemap.serializer.html
mime-type=text/html name=html
pool-grow=4 pool-max=32
pool-min=4
src=org.apache.cocoon.serialization.HTMLSerializer
buffer-size1024/buffer-size
/map:serializer
/map:serializers
map:matchers default=wildcard/
map:selectors default=browser/
/map:components
!-- === Pipelines
= --
map:pipelines
map:pipeline
map:match pattern=**
!-- = Dynamic Content
--
map:match pattern=viewHTML/**
map:generate src=myXMLDataSource/
map:transform src=myXSLSheet/
map:serialize type=html/
/map:match
map:match pattern=viewXML/**
map:generate src=myXMLDataSource/
map:transform src=myXSLSheet/
map:serialize type=xml/
/map:match
!-- = Static Content
=--
map:match pattern=viewStaticHTML
map:read src=static.html/
/map:match
map:match pattern=**images/*.png
map:read src=images/{2}.png
mime-type=image/png/
/map:match
map:match pattern=**images/*.jpg
map:read src=images/{2}.jpg
mime-type=image/jpeg/
/map:match
map:handle-errors
map:transform
src=context://task/stylesheets/error2html.xsl/
map:serialize status-code=500/
/map:handle-errors
/map:pipeline
/map:pipelines
/map:sitemap
=
Live simply so others may simply live.
-Ghandi
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.
Entities should not be multiplied unneccesarily
-William of Occam
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Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Great. Thanks for the information. However the questions are still thick as pea soup. If I don't want to deploy all the cocoon jars in my war, I have to put them somewhere. It has been suggested that I put them in the tomcat lib directory. Ok fine, then how does one configure it? My goal is to end up with a hello-world war that looks like myapp.war -- META-INF MANIFEST.MF --WEB-INF web.xml (NOT a 40 meg file) jboss-web.xml classes -- my action or generator classes. -- XSL My stlye sheets. -- XSD My schema -- Other static files. -- my sitemap Now Id like to have a war that is THAT small and without having to have an intimate knowledge of cocoon to accomplish it. I want all the framework configs out of my way. I want all of the options and jars and so on neatly tucked away and where I can just drop them in a directory and forget about them. I'm seeking USER based simplicity and haven't found it yet. If I had time from my busy schedule I would potentially join the development effort to get this user simplicity but unfortunately joining cocoon and learning its development wont pay my electric bills. I have a book to write and the interface to my server for my book should be superfluous, not massively complex. The book is about the server side and I only need the interact to demonstrate what I'm doing on the server side. -- Robert - Original Message - From: Julian Klein [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 7:58 PM Subject: Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma First off I made some suggestions to your questions/problems below...skip ahead if you don't want my commentary on Cocoon. Well it seems to me that when I started with Cocoon, I was hoping to jump right on in. Unfortunately, it was not that easy, but not b/c of Cocoon, rather my limited knowledge of xpath and xsl functions. Anyway, I tackled these problems by studying the applications samples packaged with cocoon and reading the documentation. It may be discouraging, but anything worthwhile can't be done overnight, right? Anyway, as I work more and more with Cocoon, I am amazed by the genius of it's architecture. Cocoon is certainly a tribute to Open Source and the greatness of those out there working on and contributing to it. Stick to it and you will be repaid. It seems if you have a servlet working, you must be looking to upgrade. So you should not be looking for an overnight solution, which is easy with all the options out there. Overall, the advice I can give is you must consider: 1)Are you going to use Cocoon for more than just a replacement for your servlet? 2)What technologies do you want to use: XSP,XSLT,etc. 3)You do not need to build from the CVS source, you can just download a pre-built version from the site (nightly or major release) http://xml.apache.org/dist/cocoon/ 4)You may not need to create a new transformer, but perhaps just make an action. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/userdocs/concepts/actions.html 5)You prob need a minimal sitemap(see below) to match your url requests to your data. No need to worry about the endless options now. The beauty is you will learn them as you go and find that Cocoon has almost everything you could ever need. 6)Look over the user's guide and study some of the sitemaps packages with Cocoon. I hope this makes some sense. If not, I 'm sorry, but I feel as if Cocoon is a great way to go if you want to do more than just replace your serlvlet. With all the users, developers, wiki, documentation, and mailing lists...you will almost always get an answer. Whether or not it makes sense ;-) ! I attached a basic sitemap to get you going... -Julian ?xml version=1.0? map:sitemap xmlns:map=http://apache.org/cocoon/sitemap/1.0; !-- === Components === -- map:components map:generators default=file/ map:transformers default=xslt/ map:readers default=resource/ map:serializers default=html map:serializer logger=sitemap.serializer.xml mime-type=text/xml name=xml src=org.apache.cocoon.serialization.XMLSerializer/ map:serializer logger=sitemap.serializer.html mime-type=text/html name=html pool-grow=4 pool-max=32 pool-min=4 src=org.apache.cocoon.serialization.HTMLSerializer buffer-size1024/buffer-size /map:serializer /map:serializers map:matchers default=wildcard/ map:selectors default=browser/ /map:components !-- === Pipelines = -- map:pipelines map:pipeline map:match pattern=** !-- = Dynamic Content -- map:match pattern=viewHTML/** map:generate src=myXMLDataSource/ map:transform src=myXSLSheet/
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
I am with cocoon for about three months now and i remember my own frustrations when i started as a newbie. From this thread and other emails within this list and from my personal experience with cocoon i conclude: 1.) cocoon gains high (initial) attraction (many newbies questions) 2.) cocoon is not easy to apply by newbies (see this thread ;-) 3.) cocoon is far away from getting mature (focus on dev HEAD) dont missunderstand me: i mean it's robust but complex, fast evolving and ever changing ... But if you look under the hood you also find: 4.) cocoon provides a very exciting technology. 5.) cocoon IS actively developed. 6.) cocoon attracts commercial interests (projects) I assume everybody getting attracted to cocoon has some ideas in mind what he/she wants to do with it, but after opening the box it is (at first) hard to see how you could gain from cocoon within your projects. And i think that at least in commercial projects what counts is the amount of time you need to get it mastered. The (non developing) users seem to suffer from * undocumented features (wholes in documentation) * complexity, even if the parts of interest are well documented. * huge amount of loosely coupled docs and documentation sites. * lack of out of the box applications that can be used right from the initial installation (maybe the cocoon portal is an exception, but it's also really complex for the newbies, isn't it ?) * functional overkill * Lack of debugging facilities especially for sitemap checking. * very poor error reporting. You have to dig within tons of stack traces to get a clue ... Sometimes you even get no error report at all, it simply doesn't work. But it is also true, that once you have mastered the cocoon basics and once you start understanding how things work, you suddenly get so much out of it, that all your initial efforts get payed back. Because cocoon is something i really want to support, i started a Wiki page that adresses some of the most hearting issues. Hopefully this work can be used (and improved) also by others: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=SurvivalTips Besides this i recommend to have a look at the cocoon developer's handbook (developer's library) This book is now my good companion in the cocoon adventure. Since i use cocoon within commercial projects i had the oportunity to give away a small subproject to one of the cocoon developers and i was really positively surprised from the quality of the work i got back. Hence i would recommend to all other project managers out in the world: simply ask for support from the cocoon comunity and i am shure, you will either get your problems solved on the fly or you will find excellent experts who will be happy to get involved in your projects as freelancers... I hope that cocoon will master it's own future and eventually become the tomcat of XML-publishing regards, Hussayn -- Dr. Hussayn Dabbous SAXESS Software Design GmbH Neuenhöfer Allee 125 50935 Köln Telefon: +49-221-56011-0 Fax: +49-221-56011-20 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Thanks for the reply. I still, however, cant figure out how to get a hello world working on a clean war without all of the other crap in the cocoon war. The configuration file is just plain staggering to say the least. And looking at some pages that use cocoon, I'm starting to have second thoughts about its performance in high traffic situation. Quite honestly I'm pretty close to saying hell with it and just coding the interface in JSP. Although it might be powerful, if it isn't easy, its trash. No professional dev wants, or has the time, to blow 2 to three weeks just to get separation of logic and presentation. Too high of a price for too little gain. Powerful? I believe you. I believe its powerful. Scalable? I don't know. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me from the IBM site (which was done in cocoon) was taking 10 to 15 seconds per page to render. Put that in production and your company can kiss sales goodbye. Internet users are impatient and any guy with a DSL isn't going to wait 15 seconds for your page. User friendly? You've got to be joking. No, I don't want to take up any more time from folks. I just simply don't have the time to mess with it. Reading config files and figuring out how the hell to build a new application just isn't what I want to do a very trivial part of my project with. -- Robert - Original Message - From: SAXESS - Hussayn Dabbous [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 9:52 PM Subject: Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma I am with cocoon for about three months now and i remember my own frustrations when i started as a newbie. From this thread and other emails within this list and from my personal experience with cocoon i conclude: 1.) cocoon gains high (initial) attraction (many newbies questions) 2.) cocoon is not easy to apply by newbies (see this thread ;-) 3.) cocoon is far away from getting mature (focus on dev HEAD) dont missunderstand me: i mean it's robust but complex, fast evolving and ever changing ... But if you look under the hood you also find: 4.) cocoon provides a very exciting technology. 5.) cocoon IS actively developed. 6.) cocoon attracts commercial interests (projects) I assume everybody getting attracted to cocoon has some ideas in mind what he/she wants to do with it, but after opening the box it is (at first) hard to see how you could gain from cocoon within your projects. And i think that at least in commercial projects what counts is the amount of time you need to get it mastered. The (non developing) users seem to suffer from * undocumented features (wholes in documentation) * complexity, even if the parts of interest are well documented. * huge amount of loosely coupled docs and documentation sites. * lack of out of the box applications that can be used right from the initial installation (maybe the cocoon portal is an exception, but it's also really complex for the newbies, isn't it ?) * functional overkill * Lack of debugging facilities especially for sitemap checking. * very poor error reporting. You have to dig within tons of stack traces to get a clue ... Sometimes you even get no error report at all, it simply doesn't work. But it is also true, that once you have mastered the cocoon basics and once you start understanding how things work, you suddenly get so much out of it, that all your initial efforts get payed back. Because cocoon is something i really want to support, i started a Wiki page that adresses some of the most hearting issues. Hopefully this work can be used (and improved) also by others: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=SurvivalTips Besides this i recommend to have a look at the cocoon developer's handbook (developer's library) This book is now my good companion in the cocoon adventure. Since i use cocoon within commercial projects i had the oportunity to give away a small subproject to one of the cocoon developers and i was really positively surprised from the quality of the work i got back. Hence i would recommend to all other project managers out in the world: simply ask for support from the cocoon comunity and i am shure, you will either get your problems solved on the fly or you will find excellent experts who will be happy to get involved in your projects as freelancers... I hope that cocoon will master it's own future and eventually become the tomcat of XML-publishing regards, Hussayn -- Dr. Hussayn Dabbous SAXESS Software Design GmbH Neuenhöfer Allee 125 50935 Köln Telefon: +49-221-56011-0 Fax: +49-221-56011-20 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail:
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
depending on what you are doing with cocoon, you get quite amazing performance due to caching. My website is completely done in XML and using cocoon. and its almost as performant as with ordinary html. I was really amazed when i saw this although the site is super simple... http://www.saxess.de I your use case is more complex, you are hitting databases and creating dynamic data, you will allways suffer from performance. This has nothing to do with cocon. And if you talk about performace, you have to take into account, what cocoon does under the hood (XSLT is always a performance problem). regards, hussayn Robert Simmons wrote: Thanks for the reply. I still, however, cant figure out how to get a hello world working on a clean war without all of the other crap in the cocoon war. The configuration file is just plain staggering to say the least. And looking at some pages that use cocoon, I'm starting to have second thoughts about its performance in high traffic situation. Quite honestly I'm pretty close to saying hell with it and just coding the interface in JSP. Although it might be powerful, if it isn't easy, its trash. No professional dev wants, or has the time, to blow 2 to three weeks just to get separation of logic and presentation. Too high of a price for too little gain. Powerful? I believe you. I believe its powerful. Scalable? I don't know. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me from the IBM site (which was done in cocoon) was taking 10 to 15 seconds per page to render. Put that in production and your company can kiss sales goodbye. Internet users are impatient and any guy with a DSL isn't going to wait 15 seconds for your page. User friendly? You've got to be joking. No, I don't want to take up any more time from folks. I just simply don't have the time to mess with it. Reading config files and figuring out how the hell to build a new application just isn't what I want to do a very trivial part of my project with. -- Robert - Original Message - From: SAXESS - Hussayn Dabbous [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 9:52 PM Subject: Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma I am with cocoon for about three months now and i remember my own frustrations when i started as a newbie. From this thread and other emails within this list and from my personal experience with cocoon i conclude: 1.) cocoon gains high (initial) attraction (many newbies questions) 2.) cocoon is not easy to apply by newbies (see this thread ;-) 3.) cocoon is far away from getting mature (focus on dev HEAD) dont missunderstand me: i mean it's robust but complex, fast evolving and ever changing ... But if you look under the hood you also find: 4.) cocoon provides a very exciting technology. 5.) cocoon IS actively developed. 6.) cocoon attracts commercial interests (projects) I assume everybody getting attracted to cocoon has some ideas in mind what he/she wants to do with it, but after opening the box it is (at first) hard to see how you could gain from cocoon within your projects. And i think that at least in commercial projects what counts is the amount of time you need to get it mastered. The (non developing) users seem to suffer from * undocumented features (wholes in documentation) * complexity, even if the parts of interest are well documented. * huge amount of loosely coupled docs and documentation sites. * lack of out of the box applications that can be used right from the initial installation (maybe the cocoon portal is an exception, but it's also really complex for the newbies, isn't it ?) * functional overkill * Lack of debugging facilities especially for sitemap checking. * very poor error reporting. You have to dig within tons of stack traces to get a clue ... Sometimes you even get no error report at all, it simply doesn't work. But it is also true, that once you have mastered the cocoon basics and once you start understanding how things work, you suddenly get so much out of it, that all your initial efforts get payed back. Because cocoon is something i really want to support, i started a Wiki page that adresses some of the most hearting issues. Hopefully this work can be used (and improved) also by others: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=SurvivalTips Besides this i recommend to have a look at the cocoon developer's handbook (developer's library) This book is now my good companion in the cocoon adventure. Since i use cocoon within commercial projects i had the oportunity to give away a small subproject to one of the cocoon developers and i was really positively surprised from the quality of the work i got back. Hence i would recommend to all other project managers out in the world: simply ask for support from the cocoon comunity and i am shure, you will either get your problems solved on the fly or you will find excellent experts who will be happy to get involved in your
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Robert Simmons wrote: know. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me again: _what_ Wiki are you referring to? If it's http://wiki.cocoondev.org/, please quantify how slow, so that I can get a grip on it. That Wiki is built using plain JSP taglibs, BTW. Nothing to do with Cocoon. /Steven -- Steven Noelshttp://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog athttp://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.orgstevenn at apache.org - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
You really does dont want the help people give you: Please just click here: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=Tutorials and you will be ready after 3 hours. Please read just the 1st tutorial from IBM developerworks. Antonio Gallardo. - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Robert Simmons dijo: No professional dev wants, or has the time, to blow 2 to three weeks just to get separation of logic and presentation. How you think a Professional developer do that? I ended my Master Degree in Computer Science in 1995 just before Java hits the streets and Windows 95 was just at beta release? How do you think I am here now? Too high of a price for too little gain. Please if you said that phrase you dont really understand what is in the game. I recommend you to check how this little grain affect totally the Web machinery at all. I recommend you to read the second chapter of the Carsten Matthew book: XML: Building XML Applications. You can find it at amazon.com Powerful? I believe you. I believe its powerful. Scalable? I don't know. Scalable? Please, just check JBoss.org and answer yourself the question. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me from the IBM site (which was done in cocoon) was taking 10 to 15 seconds per page to render. This is an issue for your computer and/or Internet connection. I live in Managua, Nicaragua. Maybe it is so far that you dont know where is it. But the wiki takes me less that 3 secs. Of course I use Red Hat Linux 8.0 and Mozilla that is faster than MS IE. Sometimes I go down and use a Windows machine, but I always use Mozilla, because it is faster. Check http://www.mozilla.org Put that in production and your company can kiss sales goodbye. Internet users are impatient and any guy with a DSL isn't going to wait 15 seconds for your page. This is a developers issue, not a Cocoon issue. There are many books related about web design. How to improve performance using CSS, etc. Take a look at that technology and tell me how slow it is. User friendly? You've got to be joking. What? Cocoon? Well, here I think you must first understand the philosophy behind Cocoon and after that we can talk about that. Windows makes us too lazy, we want to do all just clicking a mouse. No, I don't want to take up any more time from folks. I just simply don't have the time to mess with it. Reading config files and figuring out how the hell to build a new application just isn't what I want to do a very trivial part of my project with. I will see you back again. Maybe the next year, how knows, but if you will stay at the development arena, you soon or late will be faced again with this technology. Please, Take a note of that. Best Regards, Antonio Gallardo. - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Try to follow the instructions at the following page I just created: http://wiki.cocoondev.org/Wiki.jsp?page=CreateMinimalWebapp Ignore the comments obviously geared at making this part of the build (and possibly part of the release.) You'll need a source distribution of Cocoon 2.0.4, which I know is not what you wanted but this is where things are now. Following that, you should be able to get a hello world up and running based on the existing documentation within an hour at least, and you could be writing your own Generators tonight if you follow the tutorial I already sent you a link to. Geoff Howard -Original Message- From: Robert Simmons [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 4:10 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma Thanks for the reply. I still, however, cant figure out how to get a hello world working on a clean war without all of the other crap in the cocoon war. The configuration file is just plain staggering to say the least. - Please check that your question has not already been answered in the FAQ before posting. http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/faq/index.html To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Robert Simmons dijo: No professional dev wants, or has the time, to blow 2 to three weeks just to get separation of logic and presentation. How you think a Professional developer do that? I ended my Master Degree in Computer Science in 1995 just before Java hits the streets and Windows 95 was just at beta release? How do you think I am here now? Too high of a price for too little gain. Please if you said that phrase you dont really understand what is in the game. I recommend you to check how this little grain affect totally the Web machinery at all. I recommend you to read the second chapter of the Carsten Matthew book: XML: Building XML Applications. You can find it at amazon.com Well, I dont think you understand the pressures in professional circles to meet deadlines. In the open source world, you have all the time in the world to screw with things. When using a product in a working business deadlines get in the way of doing things the right way. This is an explanation of why .NET has been successful. Its a cheap piece of garbage, but its easy to get started. Noone wants to be an expert in 10 hours but they at leat want to have somethign of a clue. Powerful? I believe you. I believe its powerful. Scalable? I don't know. Scalable? Please, just check JBoss.org and answer yourself the question. The Wiki page runs very slow for me and a tutorial linked to me from the IBM site (which was done in cocoon) was taking 10 to 15 seconds per page to render. This is an issue for your computer and/or Internet connection. I dont knwo the cuase but it isnt my isp. I live in Managua, Nicaragua. Maybe it is so far that you dont know where is it. But the wiki takes me less that 3 secs. Of course I use Red Hat Linux 8.0 and Mozilla that is faster than MS IE. Sometimes I go down and use a Windows machine, but I always use Mozilla, because it is faster. Check http://www.mozilla.org Great. You like mozilla. Do me a favor and go out there and convince all the bluechip companies to switch. You may not like microsoft but in a business world you have to deal with it. Whether that is bad or good is irrlevant. Put that in production and your company can kiss sales goodbye. Internet users are impatient and any guy with a DSL isn't going to wait 15 seconds for your page. This is a developers issue, not a Cocoon issue. There are many books related about web design. How to improve performance using CSS, etc. Take a look at that technology and tell me how slow it is. What CSS has to do with my question is beyond me. User friendly? You've got to be joking. What? Cocoon? Well, here I think you must first understand the philosophy behind Cocoon and after that we can talk about that. No no no. You arent gettign it. People dont WANT to understand the philosophy. Do I have to understand the JBoss development philosophy to use it? Nope. What about Ant? Again nope. What about Tomcat? Agin the answer is no. You dont seem to be able to separate the cocoon developer from the cocoon user. One is trying to contribute to the cocoon project but the rest of us just want to use it to snap up a pipeline in 15 min. We honestly couldnt care less what the philosophy of its internal design is. Its irrlevant to us. I get paid for makign applications for my company, not for learnign the concept of cocoon. If I have to learn the philosophy behind how a tool is developed, that tool simply wont make the production schedule. Business life is hard. In addition, according to object oriented philosophy, I shouldnt have to know the philosophy behind a tool. Cocoon should be a black box that i can use to wire together sitemaps. The only time I need know anything is the interface I have to implement to design a new generator and what xml file to declare it in. If someone asks me how does cocoon work? I should be able to say beats me but it does. You can bet that when .NET puts out their product it will be like that. Knowing Microsoft the product will be utter crap. However it will trounce cocoon into the dust and people such as yourself will be staring at the carnage and saying but WHY!!!??? The answer is the same reason why many awesome technologies have never worked. They failed to attract interest and customers and never evolved. Windows makes us too lazy, we want to do all just clicking a mouse. Welcome to business life reality. Your geek based (and I mean that as a complement) idealism jsut flat doesnt pay the bills. No, I don't want to take up any more time from folks. I just simply don't have the time to mess with it. Reading config files and figuring out how the hell to build a new application just isn't what I want to do a very trivial part of my project with. I will see you back again. Maybe the next year, how knows, but if you will stay at the development arena, you soon or late will be faced again with this technology. Please, Take a note of that. Probably
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Hi Robert - Ok, my turn to weigh in. First off, one first principle about any technology is that it's usability and suitability are largely subjective. Over the years, I have found that many technologies - JSP, EJBs, PHP, Perl/CGI, ActiveX, etc. - can work great if YOU like them and know how to use them EFFECTIVELY. And the same holds absolutely true with Cocoon. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don't. For some jobs it rocks, for others a simpler approach will get the job done as well, if not better. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE RIGHT OR WRONG. Put it another way, you cannot compare Cocoon with ActiveX, Perl, JSP or anything else - it is all apples and oranges. Though I'm a Cocoon book author, I can tell you I myself sometimes get fairly pissed with Cocoon. Only recently I was coding up a simple, though lengthy, form in Cocoon using an XSP with the formval logicsheet, when I started getting an error that I was exceeding 66535 (or whatever) bytes for a method. Gr. Luca will affirm that I was not feeling too kindly towards Cocoon that week. But in the end, (thanks to his client-side validation mechanism) I recoded and am fairly happy with the result. Should I have chosen Cocoon for this? Maybe not, actually. I probably put in more hours with this project than I would have using a JSP. But now that I'm done, I can modify the form to fit the client's changing needs much more easily than had I used a JSP. On the other hand, when I added credit-card capabilities to my site, I never even once considered Cocoon - I rolled a servlet with my own helper objects and am totally satisfied with the result. Point is, Cocoon is no magic bullet but then again, nothing is. You make an excellent point that I have to agree with: it is hard to separate the Cocoon developer from the Cocoon user. To put it another way, you have to be prepared to be a bit of a Cocoon developer to be an effective Cocoon user. Frankly, yes, that can be a deterent to adoption. If you are under the gun to get some multi-output app up and you are looking at Cocoon stricly as a user of the technology yes, you might have to learn more than you bargined for. But that is the nature of this particular beast, just like it is the nature of M$ products that you know next to nothing about how they operate (until you find yourself hacked through one of their many security holes). Again, you can't compare the two - apples and oranges. Absolutely, Cocoon is complex, and large, which I personally don't care for. But the flip side is that you can also do many, many, many things with Cocoon. If you like such complexity and flexibility, and care to take the time to work through the materials at hand (like mine and Jeremy's book ;) ), you will be happy with the results. I also must agree with you and Hussayn about the business aspect of Cocoon. Having consulted at all layers of IT, I know what people look at. And yes, Cocoon can fall short for the reasons mentioned - usability, time-to-get-running, documentation, abstraction from details, separation of developer/user knowledge, etc. Business does judge harshly, though perhaps unfairly. Certainly, we serious users will all sneer if a pile of MS sh*t is taken more seriously than Cocoon. But, then again, there is a point. MS may have the usability (or perhaps the perception of usability) edge on Cocoon. But, here is the hard part, it is NO ONE'S JOB TO CHANGE THIS. This freedom from accountability is both a strength and weakness of OSS in general. One the one hand, someone with a great idea can start something like Cocoon, but conversely there is no implicit responsibility to an end-user like you (and the others who periodically raise the same objections). If someone wants to position Cocoon for the big time and compete on the usability front with the big commercial software products, then that person/organization can do something about it. Many of the current developers and users of Cocoon don't need more than they have and are neither concerned nor required to be concerned with this debate. If you want to change it, put together a project - email me offline and let's talk. I love the idea. But that is the only way it will be done - nobody actually has the responsibility to do anything. No one involved with Cocoon has the job to capture the minds and hearts of web publishers. If they don't want to, that's just fine. And if, as a result, some other products does end up capturing the minds and hearts of web publishers, that is fine too. Regards, Lajos -- Lajos Moczar Open Source Support, Consulting and Training Cocoon Developer's Handbook (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0672322579) _ _ / \ / /___\ / / \ /
Re: Cocoon is complex, but worth it! Some Answers to your dilemma
Hi Robert - Ok, my turn to weigh in. First off, one first principle about any technology is that it's usability and suitability are largely subjective. Over the years, I have found that many technologies - JSP, EJBs, PHP, Perl/CGI, ActiveX, etc. - can work great if YOU like them and know how to use them EFFECTIVELY. And the same holds absolutely true with Cocoon. Sometimes you like it, sometimes you don't. For some jobs it rocks, for others a simpler approach will get the job done as well, if not better. THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE RIGHT OR WRONG. Put it another way, you cannot compare Cocoon with ActiveX, Perl, JSP or anything else - it is all apples and oranges. Though I'm a Cocoon book author, I can tell you I myself sometimes get fairly pissed with Cocoon. Only recently I was coding up a simple, though lengthy, form in Cocoon using an XSP with the formval logicsheet, when I started getting an error that I was exceeding 66535 (or whatever) bytes for a method. Gr. Luca will affirm that I was not feeling too kindly towards Cocoon that week. But in the end, (thanks to his client-side validation mechanism) I recoded and am fairly happy with the result. Should I have chosen Cocoon for this? Maybe not, actually. I probably put in more hours with this project than I would have using a JSP. But now that I'm done, I can modify the form to fit the client's changing needs much more easily than had I used a JSP. On the other hand, when I added credit-card capabilities to my site, I never even once considered Cocoon - I rolled a servlet with my own helper objects and am totally satisfied with the result. Point is, Cocoon is no magic bullet but then again, nothing is. You make an excellent point that I have to agree with: it is hard to separate the Cocoon developer from the Cocoon user. To put it another way, you have to be prepared to be a bit of a Cocoon developer to be an effective Cocoon user. Frankly, yes, that can be a deterent to adoption. Yes, that is a deterrent to adoption. The strange thing is that it can be easily fixed imho. What im talkign about is componetizing the distribution. Hide anything the user doesnt need to routinely play with. The cocoon.xconf file for example. I hear that I shouldnt be touching it. Fine, put it away in a jar. Make it include any local user override of that file (via simple XML include mechanism) and put the defaults away. Package the jars all into one and label it cocoon-all.jar. In the online docs it would say well drom the cocoon-all.jar into your tomcat lib directory or in your war and off you go. What we are talkign aobut isrepackaging. Some ant work. some config work and thats it. Low budget solutions to high budget issues. Then what a user sees when he gets to cocoon.war is something like the following (in XML notation): quote Getting Started guide: To get started in cocoon you need to download the cocoon distribution war. Inside the lib directory you will find cocoon-all.jar This is the core cocoon classes and everythign you need to start developing with cocoon. Included as well is the cocoon-dev.jar. This file contains the developer interfaces to cocoon, such as for creating custom generators, and nothing else. It is provided as a convenience means for developers to compile their custom genrators and other extensions without havign to deal with the entire cocoon-all.jar. Inside the full kitchen sink version of cocoon.war we have the entire cocoon web site represented. It contains numerous examples and documentation. What is important to know is that the only files you really need are WEB-INF/lib/cocoon-all.jar WEB-INF/web.xml, a sitemap, and your own stuff. So your basic cocoon application war would look like the following war-file directory name=WEB-INF directory name=lib file name=cocoon-all.jar/ /directory file name=web.xml/ /directory sitemap.xmap /war-file The cocoon-all.jar could alternatively be placed in the lib directory of Tomcat if you dont wish to have it in every one of your war files. In addition it should be noted that it is rare that you will have to modify the web.xml. Remember that cocoon *IS* the servlet. You are merely extending that servlet with your own content and potentially special classes. You may have to create a deployment descriptor for your specific application server if the need arises, but the web.xml is somethign you should only rarely modify. The sitemap is the core of the cocoon process. it describes how the data flows from generation through to serialization. It is through defiining sitemaps that we map URLs to these various pipelines. For example a single url might be mapped to take mycompany.xml and use an XSL sheet to translate it into HTML. Another URL might be mapped to a pipeline that converts that same XML sheet to WML for display on phones. So, lets get a minimal distribution of this thing running. Start off by creating the above structure. For your first
