[OT] Cocoon - jakarta-taglibs similarities

[Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>]

Just a random thought..

Recently, Jakarta taglibs (http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/) and
Cocoon have been looking very similar in terms of functionality.

Have a look at the list of taglibs. SQL, XSL, XTags, JNDI.. at one time, Cocoon
was the only game in town for some of these. No longer.

And then there's the IO taglib, which includes a "Tag Pipelining Proposal",
which defines an API for "transformers". A quoted example:
  
  <xsl:apply xsl="someStylesheet.xsl">
    <io:soap url="someSoapURL" SOAPAction="doSomething">
      <xsl:apply xsl="xmlRpcToSoap.xsl">
        <io:xmlrpc url="someXmlRpcUrl">
          <io:body>
            <methodCall>
              <methodName>do.something</methodName>
                <params>
                  <param>
                    <value><i4>1234</i4></value>
                  </param>
                </params>
            </methodCall>
          </io:body>
        </io:xmlrpc>
  
      </xsl:apply>
    </io:soap>
  </io:xmlrpc>
  
  The above example looks like a relatively small block of XML but its actually
  doing quite a lot. Reading from inside-out, its calling an XML-RPC service
  with some XML data then using XSLT to style the result into a SOAP request
  which is then HTTP POSTed into a SOAP service. The result of the SOAP request
  is then styled again using XSLT and output to the users browser.

 (http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/io-doc/index.html)


So far, taglibs have lacked the final "serializer" step, where XML/whatever is
rendered to a binary format, but even that is changing, with recent proposals
to add an image taglib[1] and an xsl-fo taglib [2].

I think here we have another example of "Worse is Better" [3]. The JSP virus
has spread. People attracted to it's low initial overhead have improved it's
functionality to around 90% of what users really need. It may never reach that
last 10% (stream-based IO vs. SAX, for example), but it's Good Enough.

Thoughts?


--Jeff


[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=100725199100002&r=1&w=2
[2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=100695064900003&r=1&w=2
[3] http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles/good-news/subsection3.2.1.html


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