From xml-cocoon-dev  Thu Dec 08 09:18:15 2005
From: Andreas Hochsteger <e9625392 () student ! tuwien ! ac ! at>
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 09:18:15 +0000
To: xml-cocoon-dev
Subject: Re: [Poll] We need to align on one point (was Re: [Vision] Knowing
Message-Id: <4397FA57.3060806 () student ! tuwien ! ac ! at>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=113403353831130


Berin Loritsch schrieb:
>> So, please :-), only one language, and as cocoon (or whatever it's name
>> will be :-) ) is a J2EE framework: _Java_
> 
> I hear you, and hopefully even more.
> 
>> Sorry for the interference :-), regards,
>> tom
>>
> 
> Please interfere.  Users lurking on dev are more than welcome to contribute 
> their oppinions.

I'm just a user of Cocoon too for some years now, lurking on this list 
for the same time and I'm eagerly following the recent discussions.

What I can contribute to this discussion from our experience is, that 
FlowScript provided new ways for us to describe page flows. But 
development hasn't been that easy all the time.

We had problems understanding why certain things behaved differently 
(e.g. JavaScript String vs. Java String) thus ending up in wrapping many 
strings with new java.lang.String(...) just in case it might not be a 
Java String.

We had also problems debugging FlowScripts and so our code was full of 
debugging statements which we had to keep in production to be able to 
track down runtime problems. Please don't ask how huge our logfiles got :-).

So for us it was just the concept of continuations which brought us some 
improvement but not the language itself. And we have just Java 
developers writing FlowScript code, since it is not possible (in our 
case) to write FlowScript without Java knowledge.
I don't want to say, that it is not possible at all. But I think you 
have to provide a very strict layer to FlowScript (no direct access to 
Java at all) to give a JavaScript developer the possibility to be 
productive without being surprised.

It would have been much easier for us, if JavaFlow with all the benefits 
of Java (JUnit, JavaDoc, Debugging, strong IDE support, ...) would have 
been ready for production the time we began to develop our applications ...


Just my € 0.02 ...

Cheers,
Andreas