I’m getting ready to launch a rant about my former BBF (Best Browser Forver) — FireFox. It seems that lately they’ve released some real turds for the Mac Leopard Platform — I’ve been using Safari more and more. I have only been using Firefox as a development tool, and in that role it reminds me of some of the early IntelliJ releases. Let’s hope they get their act together.

Commenting on what Danilo said about some people pick up quickly, yes, you are right. Some people pick quicker than other “In One of the learning Style”. For example, I am very slow when reading, because I have to stop every while and then and visualize what’s going on, so I learn quicker by vision. During my math courses, I could not understand any concept of solve any problem, even the smallest one, unless I draw them. I can not learning by listening. I failed all the courses that I attended the classes for. No, don’t get me wrong. The profs were great, but, not my way in learning. Some people get it easier by reading, and some people don’t get it in any way. Things that took me time and effort to learn, stuck with me for longer time. That’s why I am looking forward to learn Cocoon.

Speaking about Cocoon, it looks like it’s giving us some headache. I needed to understand every step I am going to take, exactly like what you needed. I had to blindly follow all the examples on the site, and then dig into the resulting components. The users on mailing list helped me a lot, especially when they realized that I can not use mvn at this point. Now I have a basic idea of how things work with Cocoon and I will move from here. I am working on a tutorial that will be found soon on wordpress.

One thhing may help you lot in understanding Cocoon, is if you think of it as a plat form that runs another application. So in order to create the simplest Cocoon application from scratch, you need to build the platform (which going to be the war), then you build the application and install it into the war.

I am trying to explain this in details on my new blog. The tutorials are not complete of course (not even close). I am planing to complete a level every week or so.

I think it’s very interesting how people “learn” with respect to programming languages, frameworks and the like. I’ve worked for years with people that could read JavaDocs and then just throw code out like they had been born with it in them. Others can hear a lecture or work with someone that knows it, and BAM, they’re off and running.

I’ve always picked things up with difficulty — Old school with books, yet I’ve always gained benefit with “typing out the code” along with the reading and running the examples. The JavaDocs and the like come later when I really want to refine what I know. That first mile is always the steepest for me.

There is absolutely nothing personal here; I think yours and Joerge’s opinions are extremely helpful and I feel comfortable asking the questions I think I need to have answered.

I will be very busy this week, but while I have some time I’ll compile a list of ideas/questions about what I’d like to do. From there we can see if we can make forward progress.

“Yeah, that explains why I can’t get a debugger running on it UNLESS I use the entire build system and Jetty in the article, and I can’t do it with IntelliJ cleanly and in the manner that I wish. Oh yeah, by the way, the ‘mvn war:war’ task is broken –> ‘no web.xml’.”
Unfortunately I don’t use IntelliJ but I believe some active committers do use so you could ask how to set up an environment and maybe add this information to our documentation.
When it comes to broken mvn war:war, which directory is the working one when you lunch this command?

“The urls you mention are useful, but frankly after surfing your site for two weeks, I never ran across them before. Does that say anything about your documentation or organization?”

Good question. I would like to hear your suggestions how to improve it. Usually it’s easier for someone outside the project to spot the weaknesses.

“No, I want to use MY TOOLKIT and my tools. I want to integrate Cocoon into MY enterprise environment, not the one specified by the Cocoon group. Building from a root folder and creating a build tree the way that I want it is more important to adoption than just downloading source, running the app and hacking away.”

I must admit that I don’t have experience with in-house development toolkits so it’s quite hard for me to give you tips. If you could elaborate a little bit on your requirements, problems and obstacles maybe we could come to some useful conclusions, I don’t know.

“I understand that it’s much more sexy to keep developing a platform instead of addressing “FUD-dy-duddies” issues, but people like me make decisions on enterprise platforms, and I have bigger issues to address, like integration with existing platforms, resource skill-sets, time-to-market and learning curve.”

Repeating myself but I want to make my point very clear: I promise to lend a hand as soon as you start asking for a help giving more details about your problems. Speaking for myself, it’s very sexy to help others playing with Cocoon.

I hope we can get back to arguments.

Thank you.

Well, I expected flames for this. I’ll stand by my comments. Calling FUD at this point just makes my point — I’m not satisfied with what I’ve found and your argument that everything I need is available makes my point perfectly. It’s just not working for me the way that it is.

“Cocoon/Spring … I think that there is not that much to write documentation on this topic as there is nothing special you need to do in order to use Spring while developing Cocoon applications.”

Yeah, that explains why I can’t get a debugger running on it UNLESS I use the entire build system and Jetty in the article, and I can’t do it with IntelliJ cleanly and in the manner that I wish. Oh yeah, by the way, the ‘mvn war:war’ task is broken –> ‘no web.xml’.

The urls you mention are useful, but frankly after surfing your site for two weeks, I never ran across them before. Does that say anything about your documentation or organization? Throw me a bone. I didn’t write this article without putting a great deal of thought and effort into Cocoon. I am still doing so as I just bought the latest book I could find, hopefully giving me some new insight.

“How do you want to build (compile) such a big project as Cocoon is by not using any toolkit?”

No, I want to use MY TOOLKIT and my tools. I want to integrate Cocoon into MY enterprise environment, not the one specified by the Cocoon group. Building from a root folder and creating a build tree the way that I want it is more important to adoption than just downloading source, running the app and hacking away.

I understand that it’s much more sexy to keep developing a platform instead of addressing “FUD-dy-duddies” issues, but people like me make decisions on enterprise platforms, and I have bigger issues to address, like integration with existing platforms, resource skill-sets, time-to-market and learning curve. If you’re starting from a blank screen every time with a new application at a different company that you’re consulting for, that’s one thing, but out in the real world this type of luxury is extremely rare.

Comments addressing my concerns in a manner other than “we already have all this documentation and if you do everything our way you’ll be fine” is probably not going to win my further support, and also not get posted to this thread.

I know for a fact there’s more people like me out there. Perhaps a step back from the project, looking at its ‘adopt-ability’ with a jaundiced eye may reveal some insight. I don’t know.

I’m not trying to say that Cocoon sucks, because the opposite is true. I’m pleading for better tutorials and coherent documentation. Without the kind of path that other frameworks deliver in spades, Cocoon’s future isn’t safe, which is too damned bad because it really has way too many things going for it!

Sorry, I really don’t understand your point here. How do you want to build (compile) such a big project as Cocoon is by not using any toolkit? Another question: why do you want to build Cocoon if binaries *are* shipped?

“A tutorial on Cocoon/Spring built in the same way. I believe that adoption of Cocoon would jump exponentially with a simple tutorial showing how these two fabulous frameworks can work together.

Documentation on Jar Dependencies for various builds, blocks, basic apps, etc.”

Cocoon-Spring integration in 2.2 is very tight and works very well. I think that there is not that much to write documentation on this topic as there is nothing special you need to do in order to use Spring while developing Cocoon applications.

When it comes to Jar dependencies, have you seen this:
“The ‘cocoon-core’ module is some kind of wrapper, that keeps all dependencies together in order to make it easier to use Cocoon as web application framework. For now the complete documentation of all core modules can be found in Cocoon core.”
(from http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/core-modules/)

and this:
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.2/core-modules/core/2.2/dependencies.html

All dependencies needed for “Hello World” listed there. What’s more, all of them available at standard Maven’s repository so you could easily pull them all using few lines of scripting. This way you could eliminate Maven and integrate everything with your fancy build system.

I share Joerg’s opinion that some of your points are FUD.