Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Cocoon

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:12/27/1999; 10:02:59 AM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:13906 (In response to 13897)
Prev/Next:13905 / 13907

Dave Winer wrote:

"Looks more and more like Cocoon is reinventing the wheel. Why don't they use Zope??"

I can think of several reasons that I perceive as valid--YMMV.

  1. Cocoon's primary focus is to be a publishing system based on emerging W3C standards, particularly XSLT. Zope, if only because it predates several of these emerging standards, seems not to rely on/support their use, having its own document object model, template language, etc.
  2. Despite some of the verbiage on the Cocoon site, there's no indication in reality that Cocoon has content management as a goal in the same sense/to the same extent that Zope, Frontier, Spectra, StoryServer... do. For example, there's no discussion of WebDAV support. This also puts Cocoon in contrast with, e.g. Resin, whose "Future" section observes: "Quercus 1.0 will be a collection of useful Java libraries, XSL stylesheets and scripts. It may turn into a full-fledged content management system like Zope."
  3. Cocoon came from the Java Apache project, so not surprisingly, it's Java-based. The investment and momentum behind Java on the server is staggering. Even more staggering, it's paying off. Thanks largely to IBM, there are very-good-to-excellent JVMs for every credible server platform I can think of. While Python is, in fact, my favorite of the broad-based (UNIX, Windows, Mac) "scripting" languages, it still doesn't enjoy anything like the breadth and depth of support that Java does.

Zope's a fantastic system, and for folks who are already Python fans or who are literally starting from scratch and don't mind being effectively self-contained within the Zope community (meaning, finding resources--e.g. hiring people who already have Zope experience--will be difficult), I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

Otherwise, though, it seems wisest to look at system based on the W3C standards, whether they're commercial systems (ECential™, Total-e-Business™) or open source (Resin, Cocoon).

And being Java-based is helpful both in terms of the quality of the available technology and in terms of the availability of resources, human and otherwise.




This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:52 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.