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December 04, 2005
Cocoon 3.0 - The Innovator's Dilemma
A discussion has started in the Cocoon community as to which direction the project should take in future development. While I haven't been doing much on a technical side with the project for a while, I've certainly been busy getting customers to adopt and deploy the platform. Many of the things Sylvain states in his original email are spot-on and Cocoon needs to regroup and reshape if it is to continue on as a successful Open Source project. The main developers are hard at work discussing the various options and I'm sure they will make an excellent job of moving the project forward. I've kept my comments to this blog.
However, it is interesting to note that Open Source projects are obviously not immune to the "Innovator's Dilemma". While the Cocoon community was "dwelling" on the platform, new entrants to the "market" rapidly overtook the XML platform and frameworks like Ruby On Rails are now driving innovation in the area of Web frameworks.
Innovation happens on the fringe.
I think the main problem with Cocoon is that it is now trying to be too many things to too many people and their needs. I doubt there is another framework out there that incorporates so many different modules and technologies. The abundance makes Cocoon very flexible in what it can be used for. The downside being that it can take a newbie ages to learn and get up to speed in. The lack of tools and other "enabling" factors make it frustrating for new users to receive the instant gratification the newer frameworks like Ruby On Rails provide.
However it would be a mistake to try and turn Cocoon into some XML based RoR clone. Ruby on Rails is the new incumbent - and you can't outrun the incumbent.
Cocoon should focus on what makes it special. The sitemap architecture, pluggable components - each with their own distinct role, the use of XSLT and XML to build powerful pipelines that can take content from various data-sources, aggregate the content and then render it out in a variety of formats.
At the core, Cocoon is unique and it would pay for the community to not grapple with how to rewrite everything from scratch or which parts to copy from other Web frameworks but to look inwards to find direction.
Posted by Matthew at December 4, 2005 03:51 PM
Comments
Amen. It's the community, not the product.
Posted by: Steven Noels at December 4, 2005 08:32 PM