Those #%@&@!&^ escapes again! Left a comment on Sylvain's recent outerhinking post, but noticed I forgot to escape all XML snippets in there... So redoing it on my own canvas here:

Well, probably only partly related, and I'm not trying to claim any visionary talents here, but his posting triggered a memory-synaps to an old misty posting.

I suspect that next in line sombody will want to straight-match a URL with patterns like this:

• /jnos/session/xyz
• /jnos/cont/*/xyz

To get a hold off an object 'xyz' (that is sitting in your session, or inside a continuation or apple where it maybe is being updated by a server side thread launched earlier... And behind the xyz/ could even folow a jxpath expression into the referenced object graph :-)

So in this light maybe this old idea of the 'object:' pseudo-protocol becomes usefull after all :-)

<map:match pattern="/jnos/**">
  <map:readobject src="object:{1}" />
</map:match>

The source contract could be tested for an subclassed to produce either an in vm java-object-ref (maybe even deserialized after getting it from some remote url?) or ready js-code to eval() as Sylvain was suggesting... I admit that part needs some more thinking...

Uh, no XML??? Yeah, that might sound like blasfemy to all the hardcore XMLizers in cocoon land, but we already have a <map:read> and <map:redirect-to> in cocoon that have nothing to do with XML... so, why not?

Like this I could still decide to have a <map:generate type="object" src="object:..." /> that would be the counterpart of the JNOSSerializer Sylvain hints about, and that could be used to still pull some xml representation of that object through a standard pipe towards portal, email, pdf and whatnot...

Just thoughts, you know.