On 30 Sep 2005, at 22:57, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
>
> How do you feel about this?

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