On the business level, it looks as if we'll be breaking almost even this second year of our existence, which is good and a bit unexpected after a particularly grim start of the year. Our marketing efforts (or lack thereof) still suck in quite some exotic way, but it seems like Cocoon is slowly gathering interest in our little corner of the world, and part of that buzz is reflecting in the number of phone calls we receive asking for consultancy and handholding. No biggies so far, but fun projects to be involved with. Marc is currently on-site with a new Dutch customer who is seriously investigating Cocoon as the platform of choice for its front-end development. Neat product, cool people with a clue, and a real-world challenge for Woody and Flow (yeah, JavaScript flow).
Some more of this short-run consulting jobs are planned for the upcoming months: an old-time 'emergency support' customer has been asking us to come up with a quote for a review/redesign of an existing application to make it scalable and performant enough to go public with it on a much larger scale than currently is the case. Some wicked stuff glued together, educating us about the challenges business developers have to cope with. An existing mainframe application which has been web-enabled using VisualAge Generator, producing a bunch of Windows DLLs and associated JNI wrappers for a set of generated JavaBeans and JSPs to go with that, which we now need to integrate in a Cocoon-proper setup. Another fun challenge for Woody.
Bruno has started design and development for Daisy, our CMS framework annex SuperWiki application to be opensourced "when it's ready", similar to xReporter. We've been exploring all sorts of existing frameworks and applications, and forthcoming APIs, but still we decided to go on our own with it (not without learning a lot during this exploration however). That decision wasn't terribly difficult, since none of the frameworks we explored were aiming in the direction we were interested in, nor did they offered a generic-enough design to retrofit our thoughts and vision onto what they already offered. Daisy will have a similar setup as xReporter, i.e. an Avalon-app (this time running inside Merlin as a container), connecting to a relational database (MySQL being our development database), using the now-fancy Maven build environment, and XMLBeans for all XML manipulation related code. Protocol between that server and the Cocoon-based client will be XML over HTTP. No hierarchy in the repository model, but lots of metadata-related stuff to compensate for that on a functional level. The publishing side of things will have some tree-hierarchical navigation model, which is hard to live without in a web environment.
This CMS thing will confront us with an entirely new world of challenges and opportunities, so 2004 promises already to be an interesting year. What xReporter lacked in sexiness (in terms of application domain, not in terms of design and implementation), might be compensated by Daisy bringing us into the fuzzy world of content management.
Some other thing we are planning is a public course on real-life web application development with Cocoon, with Woody and Flow as its cornerstones. No Actions or XSPs, but Avalon-components, Javascript flow and Woody forms to go with that. I'm pretty sure Marc's rants of lately might hint at the shape this course will be taking: Cocoon is ready to confront the masses that are now stuck in the world of Struts. To be announced when we're ready, presumably somewhere in spring 2004, most likely back in Ghent, and with a nice reduction for friends, associates and foes.
rsync is done - I'm heading home to enjoy family stuff.