Jorg Heymans wrote:

From the view of a recent cocoon beginner: With the existing docs it is really tough to get started. If you really want to or have to use it, you'll fight your way through. Afters some time, you've reached the level you need in the blocks you use, and your mail-list-activity fades away. The very powerful new features added in the past few minor releases, starting with 2.1, created a lot of "not found in the docs but should work according to the samples or the source" problems, at least for me.

Every second exception I googled for gave no or poor results, so I think this gap has been filled by the mailing-lists

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That's the problem ! You're perfectly right. Every month I have to re-convince my boss, that it was the right decision to kick out struts and use cocoon instead. What he tells me is "google around, and you'll find struts, tapestry, turbine in almost every blog, onjava article and case study, but there's nothing about cocoon. Everybody says it's complicated, hard to use, and needs experiences java developers, with all that action's stuff..." All you find about cocoon are really old comparisons, where cocoon without forms and flow has no chance to keep up with the others.

Some immediate small but powerful? improvements I could think of:

-relayout the startpage http://cocoon.apache.org -- there should be a link to the sample setup on http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/demos/release/ -- there should be a features page, with direct links to the samples (something like http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/features.html, but updated :-)) --- after two months i realized how powerful unions and cases are, and there is nothing that points you to the power of CForms... -- well, it is not allowed to compare in advertisments here in austria, but, why not set up a comparison table of some major web-frameworks -- who cares about Cocoon 1.x and Cocoon 2.0 links on the start page ? -- i recently read in a blog that it's really funny that a publishing- and webframework like cocoon has a really unstructured homepage... -- jorg's video idea ...

-write some articles ? -- i don't know how easy/difficult it is to get onto onjava or slashdot, but hey, some of you are apache commiters :-) !

-get the new doc's online... try to merge the wiki and the existing docs, like php does... I think daisy is capable of doing this user's comment stuff ?

-take the feedback you get from bugzilla to encourage the community -- there are really a lot of patches supplied by the users... -- it looks like bugzilla is just a one-way stack... patch in, never out :-) ...

BUT :-) I think it is the best framework around, and it won't be obsolete that soon :-)

Regards, Tom