The thing that troubles me with the archetype is that it’s three lines long. How on earth can I remember that? Particularly when maven gives me no help at all. I really don’t like having to rely on cut’n’paste the whole time.

The trouble with the warnings being harmless is that as a complete newcomer, I have no idea that they’re harmless. When I develop code, a warning from the compiler signals something that I really, really shouldn’t be doing unless I know what I’m up to. A warning emitted by default looks unprofessional and makes the user feel like they’ve done something wrong.

As to web.xml, I’ll encourage my colleague to report the issue. Watching his restart times is starting to bug me and I don’t even sit next to him.

Why didn’t I know about RCL? Likely because I first looked at Cocoon 2.2 a long time ago and to be honest, Maven gave me such grief I didn’t get far enough figure out that RCL might be useful. Or perhaps I ignored it because I “knew” that I wanted to be able to deploy in tomcat in Eclipse. Anyway, I’ll take another look and try to get over my maven pain.

Addressing your points:
1. I’m not sure what you find such confusing there. You just specify group/package (org.apache.cocoon) artifact’s name and version and finally group/package of your newly created application. If you have ideas how to reduce it and not loosing any of this information I’m sure Maven community is eager to hear you!
2. These warnings are coming from Velocity template processor and are completely harmless. I think it’s a bug in Maven’s archetype plug-in but I believe it could be worked around. Nobody had an itch strong enough to investigate it yet.

When it comes to custom web.xml, I believe there is a way to integrate it with RCL (haven’t used such feature myself). I think that it’s best to report such issues to our users mailing list so we can discuss possible solutions.

I only wonder how haven’t came across RCL. It’s mentioned in the tutorial “Your first Cocoon application using Maven 2” and I thought that’s quite expected that anyone starting with Cocoon 2.2 will read it.

At least I’m glad to see that you like RCL.

• Three lines for a maven archetype? That’s very confusing.
• What the heck are all those warnings coming out of maven when you run it?
• The maven plugin doesn’t set the M2_REPO CLASSPATH variable because it’s part of the workspace rather than part of the project. Perhaps if maven were less verbose, it could point this out and be noticed.

I did point this screencast out internally. My colleague mentioned that due to the custom web.xml he was using, he couldn’t make use of the RCL. I didn’t attempt to verify this.

But anyway, thanks for pointing the RCL. It makes life just that little bit easier.

As to the mail address, that’s a damned good point and I’ll go fix that right now.

“Cocoon 2.2 uses Maven because it’s “modularized”. What this means is you can’t have a single project with everything in it any more. You have a “webapp” project and a “block” project. And when something changes you have to build the block, install it, build the webapp, mount the installed block in the webapp and fire up jetty. It doesn’t make for a good development environment.”

It’s common opinion about Cocoon 2.2 and it’s wrong by all means. This time I decided that I must do something to show that Cocoon 2.2 is easier than C2.1 and fun even if you don’t love Maven.

Being short on my free time I decided to make a short screencast which I put at this location: http://people.apache.org/~gkossakowski/cocoon-tutorial-rcl-2.html

Basically, it shows how Rapid Application Development is achieved with Cocoon 2.2. While watching it, notice that there are no restarts or redeployments; just straight hacking.

PS. I wanted to send you an e-mail but I have not found any place where I could find your e-mail address. It’s quite weird, IMHO…