I am Jack’s inflamed liver

A roundup of things, and a very round cat.

Has it been a week already? So, last Friday was a London Cocoon Beer Meet, where I got to talk turkey (and trains and plumbing and kids and weddings) with David, Paul, Thom, Pier, Ross and Upayavira. Sadly the Hippo contingent couldn’t make it due to snow in Schipol, but hopefully there’ll be another fairly soon, where some more locals (throughout Europe) can make it.

I spent the beginning and the end of this week fighting with Cocoon’s Forms implementation. Turns out no-one was joking when it was marked “unstable”… as it’s being fixed up to become stable, various things are breaking for me. You still can’t beat it once you get it up and running and purring like a kitten, but I’m less and less sure it’s worth the number of fully-grown cats you have to sacrifice to get there. I’ll be happy when we have more end-user features in there,for developers of applications with Cocoon, rather than Cocoon developers.

We have a lot to learn from Rails. I salivate at the thought of automatically-generated cform templates, models and bindings based on a database model (given my first love is SQL, and not RDBMS mapping products). I’d even be moderately satisfied if we can get to the point where you type “cocoon myapp” on the command-line and have a best practice template application automagically generated for you. Anyway, lots of plans for how this might happen, just need to find the time to get on with it.

I’m not entirely surprised to see that one of the sites we developed has been taken offline recently, due to a contractual problem with the third-party authentication service. It seems to me that farming out your logins to a paid-for commercial company can be tricky. This is probably why Passport is quietly dying. On the one hand, it’s galling to know a publicly-funded resource is no longer available (it’s my tax money too, I should be able to use it). On the other hand, it’s not like the ongoing fees for the authentication service would have been a surprise, and you can’t blame them for wanting their money.

I got an invitation to present at the International Symposium on Social and Organizational Informatics and Cybernetics ’05. That’s just kinda funny. I’m thinking of submitting “How Cocoon and Automatons will Rule the World”. It kinda looks like it might be just another fancy spam (seems I have to pay to present … hmmm), but it is in Florida.

This weekend, I’ll be delving into the guts of WebDAV and Cocoon (a combination that’s been on my todo list for months), as I help to beat the clock for a demo to a very exciting prospective customer. I’m already cursed Tomcat three times, and I’m thinking I should have a swear box beside me as I progress. I can’t think of a single instance where using Tomcat has made me smile, and yet so many people seem to use it. What a strange world we live in.

Meanwhile, it’s Friday, so have a cat.

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