Neeme Praks skrev:
Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
Although there are many people involved in Cocoon we are just a few
who work on the core and basic infrastructure. And we where spreading
ourselves to thin in the project by both working on moving to Spring,
moving to Maven and using OSGi at the same time. So we decided to
focus on Spring, Maven and getting a release of 2.2 before continuing
the work on moving to OSGi.
Also it was a quite large work to integrate Spring and OSGi. And when
we saw that a project doing that started within the Spring community
with some OSGi heavyweights involved, it seemed like a better idea to
stop our own development in that area and either join them or being
lazy and wait for them to deliver something ;)
It would be much simpler to move Cocoon to OSGi today as we have
simplified the core considerably and there is much more support for
using OSGi in enterprise software projects now.
Fair enough, makes sense. :-)
So what is your interest in it? Would you like to use a OSGi based
Cocoon or do you feel that it would be fun working on creating it :)
My main interest is in using it :-)
And I know too little of Cocoon 2.2 to help you in the process - I would
dig deeper but unfortunately I don't have time for this right now. I
need it for my day job and I need something that works now :-|
My requirements:
* component based development with packaging (JAR up components) - here
I mainly mean UI components or "web application features"
We already have that in 2.2. OSGi will give us classloader isolation and
more dynamism. But besides that, most of what was promised for blocks
is already in place.
* easy i18n and l10n
Yes.
* fairly easy skinnability, output customization for different clients
(application logic stays the same but design and even links can change)
Yes.
* support for rich clients (HTML+AJAX) and "thin clients" (WML and
XHTML Basic)
Yes.
* template and java logic separation
Yes.
So far I've looked at:
* Cocoon blocks with OSGi - looks promising, but will arrive too late
for me
* Old-style cocoon blocks? - haven't looked in there yet.
* JSF (Shale, Seam, etc) - looks interesting, but seems to be too
"heavy" and complex.
* Wicket and Pax Wicket for OSGi support - I need to look deeper in
this, looks most promising right now
* RIFE - lots of interesting ideas, but they try to reinvent too many
things, IMO. And I don't like their static service access style.
* Spring MVC with Web Flow - my impression is that it is not easy to do
COP with it.
All of the above framworks are probably good choices. What is best
depends a lot on what kind of applications you are going to build and
what kind of web architecture stile you prefer.
Cocoon 2.2 is much easier to mix and match with other frameworks than
earlier versions. It is much more modular and uses Spring and servlet
technology in a fairly standard way.
Maybe you have a pointer to a good Cocoon 2.2 introduction (especially
the blocks support and how does Spring help you with all this)?
Or just checkout from SVN and build the docs?
You can find some docs about how to get started with 2.2 here
http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/dev-docs/. Cocoon 2.2 is
fairly back compatible, so mots of the 2.1 docs still holds. You can
find an overview of the blocks architecture here
http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon-data/attachments/GT2006Notes/attachments/12-CocoonBlocks.pdf.
There is a lot of work left to do on the 2.2 docs however :/
Last time I checked Cocoon sources was in 2.0.x series and then it was
just too much to wrap my head around. As I understand, things have
gotten a lot modular around here with blocks, but I'm still a bit wary
to look into Cocoon SVN repo. :-P
Taking a look at cocoon-webapp and some blocks samples is a good idea
but you don't need to all the code to get going ;)
/Daniel
