The Etomite Blog

What’s happening with Cocoon development?

Okay, I’m sure there are a lot of people out there asking the same question, “What’s going on with Cocoon development?”, so here is a brief update…

As I have eluded to over what seems like the past two years now, big changes are in the works as far as the replacement for the Prelude code base is concerned… So big, in fact, that I have been spending countless hours deliberating on several key factors which I will attempt to address here… These ramblings are not up for debate at this time as I am fully aware of all of the pro’s and con’s of each item I am deliberating and even if I don’t mention a particular item here it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been considered… I’ve spent hours of additional forward thinking in an effort to get Cocoon right, or close to right, the first time through… Anyway…

As anyone who has looked through the Prelude code base over the years can attest, there was a lot of room for improvement… And even though improvements have been made in the past two and a half years, most of the time has been invested into making the code base stable and adding minor feature enhancements… To be honest, the code base reminds me of a plate full of spaghetti… It was written back when someone would paint up the front end and then attempt to code the functionality into the back end to suit their needs… Cocoon will not be developed in this manner… So, what is being changed that requires so much deliberation…???

The new data object model is of great importance in that we need to not only address the immediate need to have additional data fields available to many of the resource tables but we must also make it easier to expand the data object to allow for customizations… And right along with the additional data fields and customizations we also need to keep in mind that the background data abstraction also needs to be flexible enough to accommodate this aspect…

Another main consideration is that of eliminating the differentiation between the front end and the manager… In order to do this we must integrate a more flexible and stringent set of user permissions and attributes… As a short explanation, every user will have their own settings for language preference, management panel preferences, a much larger suite of resource permissions, and much much more… All of these additional features will need to be coded into the management panels as well… And the management panels will all run from the same parser as the front end, although it probably won’t be called a parser in the new code base… It will most likely be called either a controller or a kernel…

In addition to what I have mentioned above, lots of added functionality will be implemented as well… The entire package will either be XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1 compliant… The management panels will make heavy use of AJAX technologies… Don’t even get me going on using the Web 2.0 buzzword as the term itself is ridiculous and I refuse to jump on the bandwagon in an effort to look and sound cyber-chic… Suffice it to say that we will be finding new uses for pre-existing technologies and we’ll leave it at that…

One of the most important concepts for the development of Cocoon is that of shared development… Over the years Etomite has attracted several top-notch programmers who see the benefits of a package like Etomite… They also share the vision that Dean and I have had all along in making Etomite a better product… And considering the scope of such an effort, and to bring the vision to fruition more quickly, we are accepting their offers to help bring Cocoon to the Etomite community more rapidly… This also helps in catching each others minor mistakes before code is released to the public…

So, it closing, let me say that we aren’t vacationing and ignoring the project at all… In fact, I even feel a bit guilty just taking the time to write this blog entry as I have other issues to address… And somewhere in the middle of all of this Etomite stuff I even try to have a real life… Much goes on the the background that the Etomite community doesn’t see… Rest assured, however, that we are working towards bringing you the best possible product we can provide… Be patient - it’ll be worth it…

NUFF SAID…