Article:		Enterprise Application Integration using Apache Cocoon 2.1
Subject:		Scalability, Maintainability
Date:		2003-11-16 01:39:33
From:		Bernd Hofner
Nice article and nice to see what cocoon can do! It would be interesting to see how your architectures scales. Can you disclose how many transactions/hour are handled by the system? How much time is spend in the cocoon part in relation to the back-end calls? And what kind of hardware infrastructure do you need to support your software architecture? Could you name how much of the actual processing logic has been done in XSLT vs. Java? Do you think that the excessive use of XSLT provides for a maintainable system? Personally, I do get along using XSLT but I still feel not to comfortable using it for complex tasks. Sometimes the pattern matching approach of XSLT makes it difficult to determine what really happens (which leads to a unsatisfying try-and-error development). In comparision to modern programming languages XML/XSLT seems to lack mechanisms to organize complexity and reuse. What happend to the praised object-oriented concepts like inheritance, interfaces, modules, information hiding and so forth? Are they no longer important? Or am I overestimating the logic needed for a personalized front-end?

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• Scalability, Maintainability
  2003-11-19 02:05:08 Tony Culshaw [Reply]
  
  Glad you enjoyed the article, sorry I took so long to reply.

  
  A high end wintel with plenty of memory should handle up to 30ish trans/sec with Apache Web Server in front of the servlet engine. There's no doubt that XSLT and the pipeline model cost more in terms of processing power, but then the same can be said about java compared to C/C++, or C/C++ compared to assembler!

  
  Spend more on hardware and have an elegant solution rather than cost more in time and developer pain.

  
  Regarding your excessive use of xslt ... in theory you can do the whole thing in XSLT, but I would call that excessive. It is however interesting to see how far you can take it. Our main business logic and persistence engine is all J2EE/JBoss.

  
  The middle of the road approach is to use whatever framework gets the job done. If we all believed in pure OO development why aren't we all using Object Databases instead of our old clunky Relational Databases?

  
  My final comment regards 'try-and-error' development. I have to admit that all my development is in fact 'try-and-error'!