Talking about Cocoon

A recent post on Cocoon dev mailing list, by the Cocoon founder Stefano Mazzocchi, said that "Cocoon is obsolete" ... take a look at the full post for details.

My colleague Ugo Cei, a Cocoon committer, comments on in one of his blogs entry:

For a long time, I’ve been convinced that Cocoon must do less, much less than what it currently does if it wants to thrive and survive. Now it tries to be everything to everyone: a web publishing framework, a web application framework, a portal framework and possibly a business integration platform. I don’t think you can do all of this and at the same time be simple, lightweight and easy.

I'm a new Cocoon developer, but I've been fully involved with it in these last months, and being always in contact with a lot of experienced Cocoon developers I can say that I totally agree with this sort of thoughts.

Adding a lot of features makes maybe the product more powerful, but do we really need certain features used only by, say, a 20 per cent of people?

Like said above by Ugo, it adds a lot of weight and complexity, even if new features are developed in separeted blocks, because developers need to know HOW to manage these blocks, and because, maybe, the whole architecture could be simplified if some rarely used blocks would be discarded, while the most used better "integrated" with Cocoon core components.

And I must say that, with the raising and developing of some new very interesting frameworks, like Ruby on Rails for the non-Java world, or WebWork, or Tapestry, for the Java world, weight and complexity are IMHO a very bad thing.

I think that developer forces should be driven for consolidating and improving Cocoon existing and most used features, rather than adding new ones

These are my 2 cents thoughts about Cocoon present and future.