On 30 Sep 2005, at 22:57, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

Funnny enough, I was thinking about this lately...

Cocoon is not obsolete. It's publishing paradigm, though, is de facto being obsoletized by a new world of richer clients integrating data services from multiple providers and presenting it to the user in an integrated, provider-independent, comprehensive vision.

Clients (hardware platform) thin or thick have are growing beyond our imagination. My cellphone today has more processing power than my old laptop few years ago. It runs Opera today, it might run Firefox tomorrow.

PCs, for all that matter, are disappearing, and with a new medium, one will need a new media. In another words, the web of tomorrow is not going to look like the web of to day, _not_even_close_...

As far as I can see, the great "advances" in the past five years have not been technological ones, but have been social:

- Social networks, mailing lists, discussion groups are relating us to each other across races, borders, ideologies, cultures, religions. Globally markets are no longer geographically diverse, but "community" diverse.

- Tools (like blogs, wikis, ... limited now but the client capabilities) have given the power to anyone despite its technical capability to contribute to those communities rather than only lurking passively around them.

- Even open-source (built around the same community) is becoming a viable development strategy, and communities are nowadays not only market, but also production force.

Few companies got this and are moving towards this approach, investing into the new paradigms, as much as few visionary companies did back in the 90s.

Some and more "conservative" companies consider today the creation of a simple new blog an event deserving a pompous press release, bells, whistles and a big fanfare, but that said, Cobol and Visual Basic are still around today...

Thankfully, for a number of us, the "obsolete" (or well, let's call it with its proper name: "mainstream") publication paradigm with its page impressions and light clients will stay there for a long time.

Thankfully, some others, will have the opportunity to explore those new avenues, like years ago, some explored those avenues that later became Apache, Tomcat, Cocoon, and all the rest that now is mainstream.

In other words, Ste, I see the problem from the other side of the fence, and it's not technology being obsolete, it's just that when something becomes mainstream, we feel it being sterile....

Pier