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Posted to dev@cocoon.apache.org by Lars Huttar <la...@sil.org> on 2011/07/11 17:10:28 UTC
vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Dear Cocoon developers,
Congratulations on the alpha-3 release of C3. I was just telling my
customer how Cocoon seemed to have languished, when I saw the
announcement about C3a3. That is encouraging.
We have been developing and using Cocoon applications since about 2004.
We are still using Cocoon 2.1.11 for these, since we've not wanted to
invest the time/risk in an upgrade to 2.2. But now we've come to a
project where we have a further horizon to look toward... we have about
a year, in which we could try 2.2 or even 3.0 and see if they are stable
and featureful enough to support the work we want to do.
In light of the trailoff of activity on this mailing list (see graph on
http://cocoon.markmail.org/), and lack of maintenance releases for
Cocoon 2.2, my customer and I were looking for alternatives to Cocoon:
an XML-centric web app development framework, where XSLT can be
pipelined (no serialization between steps), and where URLs are mapped to
pipelines via a declarative sitemap. As far as we can tell, there is
still nothing out there like Cocoon! It's such an elegant model, it's
surprising that it hasn't been duplicated more often. There are a couple
of other candidates, but nothing that is mature and proven as well as
Cocoon.
So we're looking at trying Cocoon 3.0. So far, the alpha release and
beta snapshots are encouraging. The amount of documentation still "TBW"
is not as encouraging.
Our plan would be to try and port the Cocoon 2.1.11 project we're
working on over to 3.0, and see how it goes. If we find bugs and missing
features relative to 2.1.11, we'll have some time to request fixes. I
may even be able to help with those fixes, though I would need help...
the times I've tried to get into the internals of Cocoon, I find the
Java classes rather overwhelming, especially as I know little about Java EE.
I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
I realize no one can 100% predict the future, especially when the code
is being developed on a volunteer basis; but I would like to at least
ask the question and gauge the level of seriousness about the project. I
also would be interested to know whether any of the Cocoon committers
would be open to contract work on Cocoon, and whether that would make a
difference to the vitality of the project.
We have derived a great deal of benefit from Cocoon, and hope to see it
grow and succeed into the future as the technology environment changes.
Regards,
Lars
RE: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Laurent Medioni <lm...@temenos.com>.
Hi,
BTW on the i18n side if it could be less linked to the front-end that would probably be better as we had to re-implement some of it in order to have back-end services able to translate things (export, reporting, ...). In fact we are using another repository for managing translations, accessed by the back-end services, and we generate from this repository some xml catalogues, then read by Cocoon...
However we are still using 2.1 as unfortunately XSPs stopped there, with no reasonable ($$$ !) plan to move to something else.
Laurent
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RE: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Thorsten Scherler <sc...@gmail.com>.
On Wed, 2011-07-13 at 12:28 +0200, Robby Pelssers wrote:
> Hi Thorsten,
>
> My opinion exactly. Unless you're prepared to write a bit of java code yourself to fill the missing gaps you might be better of waiting till C3 ships with all components out-of-the-box. Or file a request for new feature in JIRA. In the end this is still a open-source project which would fit the remark a previous boss of mine used to say when I asked for a new product feature... This is a DO-OCRACY so get your hands dirty. My contribution for the next few months will be writing blogs about my experience of moving from C2.2 to C3. And hopefully contributing a few lines of code in the end as well ;-0
that is good to hear. If you can manage to commit as well to the docu
where you see place to enhancement that would be awesome.
I reckon you will stumble over some missing components like i18n where
we can cooperate on migrating the code. Well actually i18n is not that
easy since it has heaps of deps on other cocoon packages and maybe it
makes sense to even rewrite the component. If we can manage to make it
compatible with the old-school way of configuration we lower the barrier
for people to switch from 2.1/2 to c3.
Ideally the migration old-school standard component based development to
c3 would be less then an hour. That would bring us back the old user
base. c3 is really worth to use due to all the annotation and spring
based config possibilities.
Our classes can be slimed down to a couple of lines since all the
manger.lookup nightmare is gone.
Our current development is using a axis generated client which we
initialize in spring and then injected to the class with
@Autowired
protected MyEndPoint myAxisEndpoint;
and then in our
public abstract RestResponse doGet()
we can use it right away with no boilerplate code, that is so much
cleaner and nicer.
...leading us back to the subject of the mail for me a big +1 (that is
getting popular this days ;) )IMO a very good basket!
salu2
--
Thorsten Scherler <thorsten.at.apache.org>
codeBusters S.L. - web based systems
<consulting, training and solutions>
http://www.codebusters.es/
RE: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Robby Pelssers <Ro...@nxp.com>.
Hi Thorsten,
My opinion exactly. Unless you're prepared to write a bit of java code yourself to fill the missing gaps you might be better of waiting till C3 ships with all components out-of-the-box. Or file a request for new feature in JIRA. In the end this is still a open-source project which would fit the remark a previous boss of mine used to say when I asked for a new product feature... This is a DO-OCRACY so get your hands dirty. My contribution for the next few months will be writing blogs about my experience of moving from C2.2 to C3. And hopefully contributing a few lines of code in the end as well ;-0
Robby
-----Original Message-----
From: Thorsten Scherler [mailto:scherler@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 12:18 PM
To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 10:40 -0500, Peter Hunsberger wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Lars Huttar <la...@sil.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
> > commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
> > the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
> > be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
> >
>
> Hi Lars, a couple of thoughts. I think C2.1 is pretty stable and as
> a result doesn't see a lot of activity. It is however still widely
> used. Personally, I hope to start a C3 project some time in the next
> year or so. Like any Open Source project it's as active and safe as
> the participants make it. If you see it as being attractive you
> should check it out and see to what extent it meets your needs and if
> it doesn't how much work you think it would take to get it where it
> needs to be. I suspect that for the XML pipeline world C3 is still
> more cost / time effective than a lot of other approaches. Also, C3
> seems to be slowly attracting more attention, I don't think it would
> take much to tip it over to being a pretty active project. It
> certainly isn't going anywhere!
Actually since the end of the last year we at codeBusters are developing
almost all new projects with c3 and are very happy to do so. ATM our
main use is based on the REST module but we started as well to migrate
different "old-school" components to c3 (see e.g. directoryGenerator
r1142139 on the difference to the old-school one) and have some committs
still to sync with trunk.
Regarding doing c4 before maintain c3 I doubt that. IMO c3 is the future
of this project and when people start to send patches it will become the
standard again that we were all the years before for xml. There a lots
of people still in love with cocoon. ;)
Like other pointed out c3 has not the componente base as 2.2. or 2.1.
and some componentes will be more difficult to migrate then other, but
IMO what is missing ATM is a community effort to migrate 2.1/2
componentes to c3. We at codebusters do the migration for some of those
in the near future but we should plan a couple of community days to
organize the big migration of the most important "old-school" components
to c3 with the help of the community.
...but the biggest problem I see is helping hands. If you and other are
looking into using c3 please be prepare to make your hands dirty to
document, send patches, ... Every helping hand is welcome and every
contribution matter.
salu2
--
Thorsten Scherler <thorsten.at.apache.org>
codeBusters S.L. - web based systems
<consulting, training and solutions>
http://www.codebusters.es/
Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Francesco Chicchiriccò <il...@apache.org>.
On 13/07/2011 12:18, Thorsten Scherler wrote:
> [...] There a lots of people still in love with cocoon. ;)
This seems actually to be true; for some aspects hard to understand, but
true, indeed :-)
--
Francesco Chicchiriccò
Apache Cocoon Committer and PMC Member
http://people.apache.org/~ilgrosso/
Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Thorsten Scherler <sc...@gmail.com>.
On Mon, 2011-07-11 at 10:40 -0500, Peter Hunsberger wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Lars Huttar <la...@sil.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
> > commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
> > the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
> > be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
> >
>
> Hi Lars, a couple of thoughts. I think C2.1 is pretty stable and as
> a result doesn't see a lot of activity. It is however still widely
> used. Personally, I hope to start a C3 project some time in the next
> year or so. Like any Open Source project it's as active and safe as
> the participants make it. If you see it as being attractive you
> should check it out and see to what extent it meets your needs and if
> it doesn't how much work you think it would take to get it where it
> needs to be. I suspect that for the XML pipeline world C3 is still
> more cost / time effective than a lot of other approaches. Also, C3
> seems to be slowly attracting more attention, I don't think it would
> take much to tip it over to being a pretty active project. It
> certainly isn't going anywhere!
Actually since the end of the last year we at codeBusters are developing
almost all new projects with c3 and are very happy to do so. ATM our
main use is based on the REST module but we started as well to migrate
different "old-school" components to c3 (see e.g. directoryGenerator
r1142139 on the difference to the old-school one) and have some committs
still to sync with trunk.
Regarding doing c4 before maintain c3 I doubt that. IMO c3 is the future
of this project and when people start to send patches it will become the
standard again that we were all the years before for xml. There a lots
of people still in love with cocoon. ;)
Like other pointed out c3 has not the componente base as 2.2. or 2.1.
and some componentes will be more difficult to migrate then other, but
IMO what is missing ATM is a community effort to migrate 2.1/2
componentes to c3. We at codebusters do the migration for some of those
in the near future but we should plan a couple of community days to
organize the big migration of the most important "old-school" components
to c3 with the help of the community.
...but the biggest problem I see is helping hands. If you and other are
looking into using c3 please be prepare to make your hands dirty to
document, send patches, ... Every helping hand is welcome and every
contribution matter.
salu2
--
Thorsten Scherler <thorsten.at.apache.org>
codeBusters S.L. - web based systems
<consulting, training and solutions>
http://www.codebusters.es/
Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Peter Hunsberger <pe...@gmail.com>.
On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Lars Huttar <la...@sil.org> wrote:
>
>
> I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
> commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
> the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
> be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
>
Hi Lars, a couple of thoughts. I think C2.1 is pretty stable and as
a result doesn't see a lot of activity. It is however still widely
used. Personally, I hope to start a C3 project some time in the next
year or so. Like any Open Source project it's as active and safe as
the participants make it. If you see it as being attractive you
should check it out and see to what extent it meets your needs and if
it doesn't how much work you think it would take to get it where it
needs to be. I suspect that for the XML pipeline world C3 is still
more cost / time effective than a lot of other approaches. Also, C3
seems to be slowly attracting more attention, I don't think it would
take much to tip it over to being a pretty active project. It
certainly isn't going anywhere!
Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
Posted by Steven Dolg <st...@indoqa.com>.
Am 11.07.2011 17:10, schrieb Lars Huttar:
> Dear Cocoon developers,
>
> Congratulations on the alpha-3 release of C3. I was just telling my
> customer how Cocoon seemed to have languished, when I saw the
> announcement about C3a3. That is encouraging.
>
> We have been developing and using Cocoon applications since about 2004.
> We are still using Cocoon 2.1.11 for these, since we've not wanted to
> invest the time/risk in an upgrade to 2.2. But now we've come to a
> project where we have a further horizon to look toward... we have about
> a year, in which we could try 2.2 or even 3.0 and see if they are stable
> and featureful enough to support the work we want to do.
>
> In light of the trailoff of activity on this mailing list (see graph on
> http://cocoon.markmail.org/), and lack of maintenance releases for
> Cocoon 2.2, my customer and I were looking for alternatives to Cocoon:
> an XML-centric web app development framework, where XSLT can be
> pipelined (no serialization between steps), and where URLs are mapped to
> pipelines via a declarative sitemap. As far as we can tell, there is
> still nothing out there like Cocoon! It's such an elegant model, it's
> surprising that it hasn't been duplicated more often. There are a couple
> of other candidates, but nothing that is mature and proven as well as
> Cocoon.
>
> So we're looking at trying Cocoon 3.0. So far, the alpha release and
> beta snapshots are encouraging. The amount of documentation still "TBW"
> is not as encouraging.
>
> Our plan would be to try and port the Cocoon 2.1.11 project we're
> working on over to 3.0, and see how it goes. If we find bugs and missing
> features relative to 2.1.11, we'll have some time to request fixes. I
> may even be able to help with those fixes, though I would need help...
> the times I've tried to get into the internals of Cocoon, I find the
> Java classes rather overwhelming, especially as I know little about Java EE.
>
> I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
> commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
> the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
> be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
>
> I realize no one can 100% predict the future, especially when the code
> is being developed on a volunteer basis; but I would like to at least
> ask the question and gauge the level of seriousness about the project. I
> also would be interested to know whether any of the Cocoon committers
> would be open to contract work on Cocoon, and whether that would make a
> difference to the vitality of the project.
>
> We have derived a great deal of benefit from Cocoon, and hope to see it
> grow and succeed into the future as the technology environment changes.
>
> Regards,
> Lars
>
>
Hey Lars,
I agree that the activity in here is rather low and it looks like not
much is going on.
But I see that like Peter explained in his mail: Cocoon 2.x has matured
so far that nothing really is missing;
Cocoon 3 has not received much attention (yet?), so there isn't a huge
demand for changes or additions.
However that does not change anything about the seriousness of this
community.
Reinhard and I started working on Cocoon 3 because we wanted to have a
Pipeline API and a very slim and lightweight Cocoon.
When we reached the feature set we needed for our project we stopped
adding to it - there isn't much sense in adding stuff you don't even
have a use case for.
Simone joined very quickly and added things he needed for his project(s)
and then some people kicked in and had ideas and improvements.
I find that kind of growth very natural and healthy.
So I see the rather long release cycles and slowly growing feature list
as a sign of less demand, not of less commitment and I'm absolutely
confident that new (reasonable) ideas and requests will be met and
integrated.
Bug-fix and feature releases should be expected as with any other
project (albeit with a slightly increased cycle)
I don't expect another rewrite in the foreseeable future.
Contract work on Cocoon 3 is definitely a possibility, assuming the
usual conditions (time, budget, etc.) work out.
Steven