Mailing-List: contact cocoon-dev-help@xml.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <389EEE8A.4A79DB5C@earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2000 10:10:50 -0600
From: Brett McLaughlin <brettmclaughlin@earthlink.net>
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To: cocoon-users@xml.apache.org
CC: cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org
Subject: What do you want to know how to do?
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Users (and developers as well):

	Lots of the developers on this list know this, so forgive me for
playing the same old tune... anyway:

I am authoring a book for O'Reilly, Java for XML Developers.  This book
is focused on using XML in the Java world, and the first 2/3 or so is on
creating XML, parsing XML (SAX 2.0), constraining XML (DTD, XML Schema),
validating XML (SAX 2.0 again), transforming XML (XSL, XPath, XSLT),
processing XML (DOM).

In any case, after that (where I am now) I am doing lots of topical
things, as there are quite a few important hot spots in the XML/Java
community right now.  In case you are interested, the complete list is:

Web Publishing Frameworks
XML-RPC
XML as a data source (configurations, etc)
XML Schema (extended discussion, instance documents, etc)
probably some JAXP and data binding (maybe Castor from ExOffice)

Anyway, surprise surpirse, Cocoon will be my focus for publishing
frameworks (hey, it's the best).  But I wanted to know what you folks
(the users especially) are interested in seeing.  There are really two
distinct paths I can see going in, but only room for one:

* The strict "user" path.  This would be how to use Cocoon, and how to
write XSP, and how to use the Sitemap (hopefully the timing on that
works out, since Pier rocked this weekend on it), how to use
LDAPProcessor, SQLProcessor, that sort of thing.  In other words, about
85% if not more will be usability, not writing custom producers,
processors, and the like.  This, the more I think about it, may be where
the demand actually lies.

* The "developer" path.  This would look at creating a producer,
registering it with Cocoon, then probably converting it to a processor
(or creating a new processor), registering it with Cocoon, looking at
Cocoon's architecture a little (how the request/response model maps),
then a look at XSP and the sitemap.  This is going to be (at first look,
at least) a lot more for Cocoon developers, and may no provide as much
usable information for most users, since, frankly, most users aren't
coding producers or processors.

I don't have any problem going either way, but my goal is to produce
something you folks will use and learn from, so let me know what sounds
interesting to you (asap, please, i have nasty deadlines ;-) )

-Brett McLaughlin