Joerg Heinicke wrote:

+1 (not much time for a lengthy answer).

With Forms+Ajax, it's true that Cocoon is somehow underused: very few pipelines definitions, and most of the work is done in flowscripts and jxtemplates (and of course business logic classes). So we may wonder why using Cocoon at all for this. Well, just cforms + flowscript + continuations makes it so easy! Add some automatic binding to database/object model that seems to be in the air currently, and that will be even easier.

Now as has been said, life is not just about webapps, but also about complex publishing and fetching and storing data here and there. And Cocoon will shine for a long time here.

Also, Mozilla is definitely cool and powerful, but we can't say that Cocoon must be trashed because Mozilla can be used as an application platform: JavaWebStart makes the same promise, and how many widespread apps use it?

Finally, thinking that everybody will use Mozilla is a dream (and a dictator's one -- think monopoly): - on the desktop Microsoft, like it or not, is the dominant player, and there is Safari, Konqueror, etc... - the mobile web is taking off, and these terminals don't have xul nor xslt inside, - millions of people in emerging countries will use low-end PCs with a simple browser [1] [2]

And Cocoon is a great tool to target all these various browsers.

Now it's true that Cocoon became fat over the years, and that it should be put on diet. But this is a difficult thing as so many users rely on the fat...

Sylvain

[1] http://www.techreview.com/articles/05/09/wo/wo_092805bullis.asp [2] http://laptop.media.mit.edu/