Hacking Cocoon during summer

I guess that most of you reading my blog do not know that I was accepted for Google Summer of Code. I proposed to work on Cocoon’s expression handling during upcoming summer, you can find detailed proposal here.

What are benefits you may ask. Current situation is quite depressing when it comes to expression handling. First of all, we have dozen of them in use across the Cocoon. Some of them operate on similar but still different model so it’s very usual that you may access the same values differently depending on you ask for them from flowscript or jx template. What is worse, models and expressions itself are poorly documented. My task is to change that reality and I hope to not fail.

It is interesting that on Cocoon’s dev mailing list almost nothing happens. My guess is that everyone just waits for RC1 in silence and keeps fingers crossed. Yes, we need a lot of good faith because Maven seems to hurt us really badly. Torsten has told me about his never-ending struggle with Maven bugs, limitations or bad implementation of nice idea. Basing on my own experience I must say that from time to time Maven disappoints me also. The worst thing is that when you get stuck you also get the feeling that there is no way out. It’s also a time when you feel that you really wasting your time.
I hope we’ll not waste to much time because of Maven and Apache Cocoon 2.2 RC1 will get released soon.

Last thing I would like to mention is ongoing discussion about Cocoon’s minimal requirement for JVM version. As you may already seen reading the discussion I opt for Java 1.5 as minimal. The main argument for abandoning Java 1.4 compatibility is a cost for community of maintaining that compatibility. Really, only few persons develop (or at least test) Cocoon with Java 1.4, Continuum is running on Java 1.5, etc.
If you have something to add drop a comment here or post your thoughts to Cocoon’s mailing list.