Cocoon 2.2, Spring and Database Integration

Well, it seems I spoke too soon in my last post where I said...

'therefore, you can do anything you like with technologies like Hibernate, marvellous..'.

While Cocoon 2.2 integration with Spring is watertight.. integrating with the right versions of Spring libraries outside of the default ones, and with Hibernate or JPA is not straight forward. Furthermore, as has always been the case, while the documentation for Cocoon is slowly growing in terms of quantity, and quality, it is still far behind many other projects. I had big issues getting any solution to work in terms of writing to or reading from the database, and saw, that many others have apparently had the same problems. In many cases, I saw strange hacks to get things working, and lets face it, users want to see a solution work without strange and ugly hacks.

Changing topics, Cocoon Forms has frustrated me recently, while I have always admired its powerful capabilities, I do not like the way it just seems to 'brake the flow of an application, requiring different matchers, and templating technologies. I realy wanted to enable the componentisation of forms under my own widget system, where forms could just be embedded in a simple manner. I ended up hacking my application to such a deep level that I decided I was better of just using the 'Form is the whole World' approach as per usual. Perhaps someone else has a solution around this?

Anyhow, thats enough of my thoughts on these two subjects, I will get back to them both next time.