Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
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And I suspect a lot can be done by just documenting how existing cocoon committers do their development today, not *on-top-of* cocoon, but *within* cocoon.
Stefano,
Your post reminds me a little bit of the architecture of the computers we use. Back when I was a kid (a long, long time ago) computers were fundamentally different than they are today. Basically, they came in a big box with "stuff" attached to them. You as a user really couldn't change much, because that meant opening up the box and trying to figure out how the thing worked without having documentation, schematics or anything. Along came the PC and things changed overnight. Suddenly, you could go to the electronics store and pop new components in and out because the system was just a bunch of standard interfaces. You could even upgrade the CPU if you wanted to, but making changes to the motherboard is still hard.
Cocoon is a lot like that. It has a lot of places where it is easy to add or remove stuff. However, getting into the pipeline processing, component management, etc. is still more difficult as that is Cocoon's "motherboard". Frankly, I think the team has done a remarkable job in creating a fairly modular system, and from what I can tell, the discussion around blocks is basically to keep us moving in that direction.
Cocoon's achilles heel continues to be its documentation, but I know there are several folks here actively working on that, although more could still be done. One thing that would help there, is for committers with knowledge of undocumented internals to go to the wiki and just do a brain dump so the info isn't lost.
As far as how I do my development, at least when I get the chance, I primarily write Java code. I pretty much just work on frameworks for a living and don't actually build the web sites, so I'm pretty comfortable using a debugger. I do wish I could make a change to the Java and then just run my test again, but I really don't mind having to compile and restart the app - as long as it takes less than a minute.
Ralph
