Re: Website update

Am 03.06.10 11:52, schrieb Michael Wechner:
> Andreas Hartmann wrote:
>> Am 03.06.10 00:54, schrieb Richard Frovarp:
>>> Since 2.2 is dead at the moment,
>
> what is the reason that it is dead?
>
> Technical or human resource reasons? Or other reasons?

 From my PoV there are the following reasons:

* Not enough interest from the community. Which is perfectly 
understandable given that it is "only" a technology update, not a 
functional upgrade.

* Cocoon 2.2 is not state of the art anymore, it has been supplanted by 
Cocoon 3.

* IMO Cocoon 2.2 has some advantages over 2.1, but it is not really 
groundbreaking. It feels like a step in the right direction, but there 
are some issues which seem to be not quite polished yet. Many new 
concepts are cool (reloading classloader, servlet-service framework), 
but they come with some issues which are really annoying (like e.g. 
class loading conflicts).

* The migration requires some fundamental changes to the Lenya 
architecture (dependencies etc.) which would need a lot of work (IIRC I 
wrote a mail about this).

* Maven is a whole different beast than Ant. The entry barrier is quite 
intimidating.


To summarize: The benefits of upgrading to Cocoon 2.2 don't seem to 
justify the effort. The Lenya product is very likely to become more 
complex and complicated. I think there are more important issues we have 
to address, like making the user experience more pleasant and improve 
the feature set.

I still think we should rather try to simplify the back-end by moving to 
a mature standard repository that takes care of the complicated stuff 
like concurrency, transactions, versioning etc. and focus on a nice rich 
GUI. Cocoon is great for document and data processing, but nowadays 
everything is dynamic and the user doesn't want to wait for the server 
to assemble the page. Doing complicated things on the server, e.g. in 
XML pipelines, always comes with an overhead which the user can't influence.

I'm not implying that we should abandon Cocoon (quite the contrary), but 
I have the feeling we're doing too much with Cocoon which should rather 
be done with different technologies (especially client-side ones). And 
for the things that are a perfect match for XML pipelines (like e.g. 
i18n and link rewriting), Cocoon 2.1 is IMO sufficient.

That's my CHF 0.02; maybe someone else has a different view, though.

-- Andreas


-- 
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01