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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:11:36 +0200
From: Steven Dolg <steven.dolg@indoqa.com>
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To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: vitality of Cocoon: a good basket to put eggs in?
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Am 11.07.2011 17:10, schrieb Lars Huttar:
> Dear Cocoon developers,
>
> Congratulations on the alpha-3 release of C3. I was just telling my
> customer how Cocoon seemed to have languished, when I saw the
> announcement about C3a3. That is encouraging.
>
> We have been developing and using Cocoon applications since about 2004.
> We are still using Cocoon 2.1.11 for these, since we've not wanted to
> invest the time/risk in an upgrade to 2.2. But now we've come to a
> project where we have a further horizon to look toward... we have about
> a year, in which we could try 2.2 or even 3.0 and see if they are stable
> and featureful enough to support the work we want to do.
>
> In light of the trailoff of activity on this mailing list (see graph on
> http://cocoon.markmail.org/), and lack of maintenance releases for
> Cocoon 2.2, my customer and I were looking for alternatives to Cocoon:
> an XML-centric web app development framework, where XSLT can be
> pipelined (no serialization between steps), and where URLs are mapped to
> pipelines via a declarative sitemap. As far as we can tell, there is
> still nothing out there like Cocoon! It's such an elegant model, it's
> surprising that it hasn't been duplicated more often. There are a couple
> of other candidates, but nothing that is mature and proven as well as
> Cocoon.
>
> So we're looking at trying Cocoon 3.0. So far, the alpha release and
> beta snapshots are encouraging. The amount of documentation still "TBW"
> is not as encouraging.
>
> Our plan would be to try and port the Cocoon 2.1.11 project we're
> working on over to 3.0, and see how it goes. If we find bugs and missing
> features relative to 2.1.11, we'll have some time to request fixes. I
> may even be able to help with those fixes, though I would need help...
> the times I've tried to get into the internals of Cocoon, I find the
> Java classes rather overwhelming, especially as I know little about Java EE.
>
> I guess my main question is, how reliable is the Cocoon dev team's
> commitment to Cocoon 3.0? How likely are we to see a release version in
> the next 6 months to a year? Will there be bug-fix releases, or will 3.0
> be dropped in favor of another rewrite?
>
> I realize no one can 100% predict the future, especially when the code
> is being developed on a volunteer basis; but I would like to at least
> ask the question and gauge the level of seriousness about the project. I
> also would be interested to know whether any of the Cocoon committers
> would be open to contract work on Cocoon, and whether that would make a
> difference to the vitality of the project.
>
> We have derived a great deal of benefit from Cocoon, and hope to see it
> grow and succeed into the future as the technology environment changes.
>
> Regards,
> Lars
>
>
Hey Lars,

I agree that the activity in here is rather low and it looks like not 
much is going on.
But I see that like Peter explained in his mail: Cocoon 2.x has matured 
so far that nothing really is missing;
Cocoon 3 has not received much attention (yet?), so there isn't a huge 
demand for changes or additions.

However that does not change anything about the seriousness of this 
community.

Reinhard and I started working on Cocoon 3 because we wanted to have a 
Pipeline API and a very slim and lightweight Cocoon.
When we reached the feature set we needed for our project we stopped 
adding to it - there isn't much sense in adding stuff you don't even 
have a use case for.
Simone joined very quickly and added things he needed for his project(s) 
and then some people kicked in and had ideas and improvements.
I find that kind of growth very natural and healthy.

So I see the rather long release cycles and slowly growing feature list 
as a sign of less demand, not of less commitment and I'm absolutely 
confident that new (reasonable) ideas and requests will be met and 
integrated.

Bug-fix and feature releases should be expected as with any other 
project (albeit with a slightly increased cycle)
I don't expect another rewrite in the foreseeable future.

Contract work on Cocoon 3 is definitely a possibility, assuming the 
usual conditions (time, budget, etc.) work out.

Steven