HiveMind: element

I'm having one of those days ... as soon as I stray away from my computer, it's a big disaster. Messed up with the caulking gun and made a mess. Can't find the drill bits for my electric drill, so I can't mount the smoke alarm that's been sitting, for months, on the dining room table. And when I play on the XBox, I have two left feet. So back to the computer we go.

A common complaint about HiveMind, which cropped up again on The Server Side, was how much people hate <rules>. Yes, it's a simple, stack based language sitting in the middle of the document ... what's your problem? No one ever says "that's clever" ... it is usually something like stunned disbelief or just a total lack of comprehension. Since XML conversion is one of the tenets of HiveMind, it really should be simple and easy, so ...

I've now added (and integrated, and tested) an alternative: <conversion>. It accomplishes the same thing, but is both more limited, and more understandable and comprehensable ... especially in the most typical case, where you are defining largely flat data for a configuration point (or as parameters to a factory service). Even more so, since the default when using <conversion> is to use the smart translator.

In other news ... I'm conferring with Prashant tomorrow to see about re-submitting the HiveMind proposal to the Jakarta PMC. At this time, Christian Essl will have to be removed from the initial committers list ... he hasn't responded to any of my e-mails. That's a shame, he's provided some great ideas including the use of the nested proxies to handle the thread-safe instantiation of services without the need for synchronzing individual methods. Hopefully he'll return to the fold once we get started.