Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: ...

I also want the GUI executed in the browser, but as many allready have said, the future isn't here yet. Mozilla isn't everywhere and if the new IE is atractive enough, it might never be.

Like making it easy to build applications with, for a large group of users ;) Polish and making Cocoon mainstream might not be as sexy from a research POV. OTH, if we succeed in attracting a large user base, it means a lot of other kind of oportunities, that can be exiting in its own sense, but maybe for another personality type.

XML pipelines, component orientation and IOC containers, continuations and maybe more things that once where highly inovative, are used by other projects and some of it even start to become design patterns. And our versions of the ideas might feel obsolete in contrast to some of the newer implementations.

OTH, we have been fairly good in keeping buzz word compliance, we have AJAX and can use Spring within Cocoon, e.g.

As a side note Apache's next generation WS-architecture, Axis2 is based on XML pipelines. And they have (at least at some points) improved compared to what we have. The piplines are pull based instead of push based, which makes it easier to write code and makes whole new access patterns for data possible. Also it is based on in and out pipes which in my biased vew, is a large plus.

Java modularization in general and with OSGi in particular might well become the "next big thing". And here we, in my likewise biased view, are doing interesting things and we are also starting cooperation with other communities. I also think that polymorphic sitemap inharitance will make reusability of webapps possible at a completely new level.

There will IMO be a need for server side functionality in the future as well, although what is served will change. As long as we are a strong community we will adapt to the changing circumstances. And as long as we do that, Cocoon will not become obsolete.

The main threat IMO is that Cocoon is too fat, monolithic, closed and hard to understand for new commers (and old timers as well). Which makes it harder to adapt to change.

With blocks and refactoring we can make it adaptable again. But it requires hard work and a lot of determination.

/Daniel