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[news.eclipse.technology.lepido] Re: What features do you want for Lepido?

Sandor Spruit wrote:


Sylvain, others,

My 2 cents follow.

Key feature: being able to trace information flowing through Cocoon from
the moment a http request comes in. What components are triggered? What
information is exchanged between these components? I think that's what people mean by a sitemap debugger?


Yep, but there's more to processing flow than only the sitemap. I'm sure we'll want to step from the sitemap into a flowscript, then from the flowscript back to the sitemap. See also my previous post about this.

Really nice: check the sitemap against other files for consistency. Many places in my Cocoon apps refer to the sitemap. FlowScript contains links to pipelines, stylesheets contain references to files that have to be matched with a pipeline. I often find myself testing a Cocoon sniplet to find, for example, property files or pictures unreferenced in sitemaps. Quite stupid, quite simple but soooo easy to overlook. Could we scan the files for (relative) URLs pointing to unmatched resources? Maybe a view on your project where sitemap (left pane) and other elements (right) are
combined? A warning message when you add a resource to a project?


Sorry, I don't really understand this. What "resources" are you talking about? Can you elaborate with an example?

Along the same line: having several sitemaps and subsitemaps where some construct in the subsitemap won't work because there's an overlap with a higher level sitemap. Not an error condition in the strictest sense, but so easy to overlook. Frustrating. I seem to remember that it's possible to check whether a regular expression is a specialization/generalization of another regular expression? Think: **/*.jpg and simple *.jpg


Definitely interesting, even if that requires a bit of "intelligence" in the sitemap editor. It often happens in a single sitemap also. This feature will require that we have some kind of semantic model of the Cocoon application. A first version of this model can consist in building the tree of match patterns to be able to quickly find such overlappings and what pipeline will answer to a request. This model won't be able to detect everything though, as it will be limited to those matchers that can be executed without a runtime environment. But with just regexp and wildcard matchers, we already cover a large number of cases.

I like the idea of wizards. I think it would be easier for new folks to grasp the Cocoon concepts if some frequently occurring use cases would be 'prepared' in a template for them. I have recently looked at Cocoon as a tool in our curriculum. Top issue: how to explain the relationships between technologies? Part of the beauty in Cocoon's design is that some *combination* of relatively simple technologies solves a problem. Not a big fat concentrated blurp of complexity. Consequence: you have to focus on everything working together. And that's not really easy. A wizard maybe an excellent idea to address this, as you can illustrate how your solution is built-up which is better then an comprehensive example IMHO.


Ok. See my previous answer to Stavros about "snippet wizards". Is this what you're talking about?

That's all for now, gotta catch a train.


Well, this already gives a lot of interesting ideas!

Sylvain

--
Sylvain Wallez                        Anyware Technologies
http://apache.org/~sylvain            http://anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member     Research & Technology Director