Hi Stefano:

I am glad to see you again on the list. :-)

2 days ago, I wrote an answer with some of the arguments that other people already replied to this thread. Between them:

1. Mobile devices taking off --> still a lot of other platforms to publishing. 2. Nature of software evolution in the LAN: from dumb terminals to rich client server architecture.

I understand your point about cocoon obsoleteness, if we were a "web client" community. As a really early adopter [1], maybe cocoon is no longer part of the cutting edge technology anymore, but just wait to Osgi and we can talk again about this topic! ;-)

It is simply because now there are other players trying to do (or already are doing) the same as me. We know the rich client is the next big thing in the web client side and that it is really getting hot! But this is IMHO, not new and at the end this is just another client, nothing more! Exactly as XUL, there are also a lot of other interesting technologies waiting to be landed (more digested and better covered) by the both worlds (client and server) as SVG, OpenDocument, between others.

Hence, from a server-side developer POV, IMHO, rich client will still need servers to deliver content. Because we are "a server framework community", then rich clients are just another type of client to whom cocoon need to serve! ;-)

I was also thinking if continuations are obsolete too? I don't think so. I believe even in the rich clients we still need to manage more easily current client states and the next allowed steps for them. IMHO, they are still event-drived, isn't?. Then, we cannot just keep the server open to whatever request they want to send back. ;-) I think this is also very important from the server security POV. AFAIK, in firefox we can get client's source code very easily. Well, I foresee "smart users - black hats users" "playing - tweaking" the rich client source code and sending not expected requests back to the server! This is one of the thing I don't saw covered by the maketing campaign of rich web client. For the records, I am not against web rich clients. But, will be pretty sad if we have a really dumb server just waiting to serve any requests comming from a client.

Hence IMHO, all this, this does not make cocoon become obsolete. The only thing we need to do is to make cocoon serve content for rich clients and we have the job done! This is the new challenge we saw for cocoon community long time ago. BTW, we already wanted to make this happens [2]. Unfortunately, the project failed. But this does not mean we cannot target in that direction too. BTW, this issue is too hot that, I found a new interesting link [3], I didn't check is this is really an active project.

Also, from an client-side early adopter POV this is really cool to be there developing the new rich clients for the web . There is already a lot of new interesting and cool stuff + a lot of things need to be done. But still here, in the server side, is a lot of cool things to be done too. Keep a server product "up to date" with the current trends is also a very cool challenge! Don't you think that? ;-)

Best Regards,

Antonio Gallardo.

[1] on wich side - client or server - is not clear to me from your mail, but lets assume it is from the server side [2] http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/CocoonCFormsXULUIProject [3] http://cforms-xul.tigris.org/