I recently gave up on my lurking mode at the xml-cocoon-dev mailing list. [Ah, youghtfull enthousiasm, you know how it goes... specially when your my age, and still want to pretend :-)] So I joined in a flow discussion, basically because Ovidiu's great explanation on the topic at the cocoon-gettogether gave me the feeling I actually knew what I was talking about... In any case... a weblog is no place for all this misplaced modesty (So lucky I'm not alone: [ {g#4560} == google hits]), so let's take revenge for not understanding the topic of the thread any more :-)

Flow is great. I love it, but my brain fails to place it... The basic conceptual mismatch in my head is that the web as I know it is purely *reactive* to the user... If you'ld ask me part of it's sociological success is in the pure PULL nature of things... or in other words it puts ultimate control at the end-user, and he/she likes that. (Is this the social translation of what is technologically refe(r)red to as ReST?) So, you all out there seasoned web-programmers... in stead of complaining about the back-button (you too? { g#368000}) you should understand that it's very existance probably lead to you having a job at all :-P

It's hardly an argument, at best a philosophical observation, but the flow thing seems to fundamentally collide with this by putting the control-feeling over at the developer-side. [I know there is more like this going on in our world so it really isn't an argument: stuff like TCP over IP and all, but then again a thought like 'leaky abstractions' comes back to memory] Having all these remarks based on a semantical discussion is probably a sign of my mental weekness (or overactive imagination), only thing I'm sure is that the last word hasn't been said yet. I guess the world should have a view on how Bruno solved things inside xreporter (which is every day more near to publication on cocoondev.org) Then someone out there could probably explain me why I *think/feel* the XML-flow describing in there is more passive (and thus more in sync with the -reactive- web) then the javascript inside the flow solution.

[side-note] Much of my demonstrated thought-inability here has to do with my (sorry, born with it) skepticism concerning any (sigh already {g#187000}) web related technology using the 'MVC-paradigm' wording in their motivations, objectives or manuals... In my vision of MVC it builds upon a rather thight observer-pattern-based event-coupling that is round-tripping the M->V->C->M... So while any of those efforts might be in the best possible SoC tradition, I would only go naming them MVC when I have something like a 'BackButtonPressedListener' and a 'BrowserWindowClosedListener' (not to mention a ClientsNetworkConnectionDeadListener) -- I just hate it when P.R. and marketing abuses technical terms to the extend that they become near to scientific incorrectness, aid in overall confusion and deteriorate world wide education (was that dramatic enough?)

*late update*... some six months later I get to understand I should lower my tone here... new insights during this thread (June 2003) -- hm, these kind of updates come close to revisionism