Halogen Labs Weblog

Ugo Cei recently wrote to cocoon-users:

Persistence layer: OJB, Hibernate or similar O/R mapping tool
Business logic: Java classes
Controller: Flowscript
View: JXTemplateGenerator or Velocity

Don’t let anyone try to convince you that you can find a better
combination for Cocoon. You won’t.

I’ve been having some ideas rolling around my head lately. They might be interesting, or they might not be.

What would the bare minimum for getting 80% of the webapp-programming needs accomplished under Cocoon? It looks like Ugo nailed it right on the head. Flow + Persistence Layer + Java Classes + Templates. Is everything else worthless? I don’t think so. Cocoon definitely suffers from the “kitchen sink” syndrome. Is there a way we can put these basic things together and still keep our best practices?

Perhaps 2.2 and “real blocks” will allow a basic Cocoon to be distributed, with only these simple things included. Still, there’s a huge learning curve.. but perhaps it would be lowered considerably if there was a lot less stuff to worry about, hence my idea of paring down Cocoon to the essentials.

Less stuff means less documentation to worry about. I just don’t like the idea of throwing code away.

And when 3.0 comes around, who knows what will happen.

I normally don’t post stuff about blogging, but this is too cool to pass up: the U of MN is offering a free MovableType blog to faculty, staff and students at no cost.

UThink is available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and is intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community.

Awesome!

It’s happened… Groovy in Cocoon is now official via the ScriptGenerator and BSF. (Thanks, Antonio!)

The future holds:

Actions written in Groovy
XSP (Possibly, maybe not worth it)
Transformers written in Groovy

And the big one, Flowscripts in Groovy.

This [Editor’s note: I spilled a can of Pepsi just as I was starting to write this. Half a can was lost to the carpet in the disaster.] has been an interesting few months “away” from the Cocoon community. There’s a bunch of neat stuff currently happening and “in the works” as they say.

Cocoon is moving towards a new core kernel, graciously donated by Pier Fumagalli’s employer, VNU. The whole thing was started by this thread about Avalon. Hopefully the new kernel will simplify component development and lower the barrier to custom components. And who knows, we might even get a speedup with the lighter framework! :)

We also have Java Continuations under the ASF license! This paves the way for cool stuff like Flowscript written in Java, or even Groovy (!!!!)

Finally, Upayavira has implemented nestable input modules in the sitemap! If there was a URLEncodingInputModule, you could easily nest it to ensure parameters were properly “URL-Encoded”: {urlencode:{request-param:foo}}

Talk about the future of Cocoon, Real Blocks(tm) and C3 has also been discussed on the development list lately.

I feel so out of it, even after being gone for two months at most! Things sure move fast.