Sylvain Wallez

Russel tells us a nice story about his terrible night with his sick baby vomiting around every 20 minutes.

I guess every parent (including me) had this kind of experience of sick babies crying and puking the whole night long and feeling miraculously better when the day comes, while their parents are "dragging ass", as Russel says.

Keep going, Russ. This kind of inconvenience goes away as children grow. But others are coming ;-)

Side note : I'm wondering how Russel can write so much on his blog, including after a sleepless night...

Cocoon is currently experiencing something strange : Ivelin Ivanov decided to "go away" with XMLForm to develop it independently of Cocoon.

I prepared a long entry about this, but you won't read it as I applied Stefano's two-emails pattern and trashed it. Some parts of it, though : Ivelin is a committer, and - although I'm not a native english speaker - "committer" means "commitment". I don't feel that in Ivelin's behaviour : moaning about 2.1 release, about "others" that have broken "his" XMLForm, etc.

Ah, and food for thought : look at Ivelin's bio at O'Reilly. Is patending an XML protocol compatible with the opensource spirit ? Guess my opinion...

Time to blog again. I went through some difficult weeks with too much work... both at work and at home. This is going better now : I only have too much work... at work !

An important Cocoon-related news these days is the 1.0 release of sunBow, an Eclipse plugin that provides a number of feature for Cocoon users : tree-oriented sitemap editor, XML editor, XSL debugger and other goodies.

Although - as a Cocoon hard-core user - I prefer writing sitemaps directly in XML, sunBow provides a missing piece to make Cocoon more accessible to a wider range of non-techie users.

Noteworthy also : sunBow is free. Thanks, S&N !

Steven compares the now-open-read-only community@apache.org to a monkey house in a zoo. Considering the agitation that is going on there sometimes, he may not be totally wrong, but I wish the windows stay opaque from the inside so that we don't act like the monkeys he encountered when he was a child ;-)

Frustrated, that's what I am currently.

Frustrated about not being able to participate in Cocoon development when so much is going on so fast there. And I'm starting to post some rants, which is clearly not my habit and reveals this frustration.

It has been months since I've not commited something significant. Furthermore, I've been nominated as an Avalon committer more than one month ago and didn't had the time to make a single commit there.

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Who's that guy ? A new colleague ? No, it's Marc Potier, from the Outerthought fame, which I visited with some other interesting people today.

Cold but sunny in Belgium. I enjoyed Gent this time. Last time I went there, back in november, it was foggy and I couldn't see the famous "3 towers".

This week was digital :

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Marc relates a strange experience when training people in a large company. Although they pretented to know Java, they actually did not know much about it.

We have a saying in France : "in the land of blind people, one-eyed ones are kings". Marc obviously met the one-eyed people of that company. But one-eyed kings can only keep their crown if the land's frontiers are kept closed, because the outside world is full of two-eyed people...

Now I sometimes think the opensource-java land is populated by strange aliens that have three eyes. The third eye is the community that we are living in : nice projects and smart people decuple the knowledge... and widens the gap with one-eyed kings.

Beware, ignorant kings, Cluetrain is at work, and frontiers will fall down rather sooner than later !

Today, Carsten proposed me as an Avalon committer. Some of the votes were accompanied by compliments. This was really pleasant and ego-flattering ;-)

I'm honoured to be part of the Avalon project. Even if it has gone through major difficulties recently (and they're not totally over), I consider Avalon to gather some of the most talented software architects I've seen. I hope I'll be up to Avalon's high standards !

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Yeah ! Cocoon is now a top-level Apache project. You will soon have to update your bookmarks from http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/ to http://cocoon.apache.org.

Most of the active committers (including me) are members of the new Cocoon PMC. We now have to write our charter and rules.

This move will allow to better organize the activity around Cocoon, by allowing dedicated projects for Cocoon-related projects or features (the so-called "blocks") that don't fit into the core.

Read out also other blog posts about this important news : look at Matthew, Ovidiu and Steven.