OT [Re: [Vision] Knowing When We are Done]

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Ugo Cei wrote:
> 
> Il giorno 07/dic/05, alle ore 11:43, Ross Gardler ha scritto:
> 
>> Most businesses are made up of common business processes. The odd  one 
>> will be unique to that business, but most are common. In the  case of 
>> the unique practices the software needs to be customised,  but in the 
>> case of common practices an "off-the-shelf" solution is  sufficient.
> 
> 
> Sorry but I don't believe this dream of high-level, off-the-shelf,  
> customizable components will ever come to fruition, Cocoon or not. On  
> this point, I agree with Dan Creswell [1]:
> 
> "All attempts at creating high-level business components that can be  
> re-used and re-configured have failed previously. This failure has  not 
> been for technical reasons - it happens because the requirements  that 
> yielded the original component interface were sufficiently  different 
> from the new requirements so as to require re-writing  massive chunks of 
> functionality."
> 
> And David Heinemeier Hansson as well [2]:
> 
> "On the surface, the dream of components sounds great and cursory  
> overviews of new projects also appear to be "a perfect fit". But they  
> never are. Reuse is hard. Parameterized reuse is even harder. And in  
> the end, you're left with all the complexity of a swiss army knife  that 
> does everything for no one at great cost and pain."

Off Topic now, but I can't resist...

I agree with both of these quotes 100%. In fact, my academic blue sky 
work, in my "previous life", addressed *exactly* the problems identified 
within the above quotes. It's all to do with the size of the component 
base (not the ease of configurability), the ability to identify "good 
enough" components and the ease of building a custom component when 
there is no suitable off-the-shelf component. That's why Cocoon can be 
applied succesfully in this area, it has the potential to be a very 
powerful web platform.

Therefore, for now, I agree that to be useful Cocoon has to be an easy 
to use web-development framework. Without that, there is no point in me 
carrying on - so I won't (yet)

Ross

> [1]: http://jroller.com/page/dancres/20050218#soa_doomed
> [2]: http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000407.html
> 
> 
>