There has been considerable discussion, on this list and others, about the creation of a Jakarta Web Components sub-project (also previously known as Jakarta Silk). I believe the concensus has been in favour of creating it. However, we seemed to get bogged down, several times, in discussions of the name, or of exactly which pieces of Jakarta Commons, Jakarta Taglibs, etc., should move to the new sub-project.
Meanwhile, over at Struts, we have had a number of discussions about the future of Tiles[1], currently a Struts sub-project. We have been working hard to make Tiles independent of Struts, and are close to achieving that goal. With Tiles no longer depending on Struts, it makes little sense for it to remain a part of the Struts project. In fact, it is much more likely to flourish outside of Struts. The proposal, then, is to create the Jakarta Web Components sub-project, and make Tiles the first citizen of that sub-project. This simultaneously achieves several objectives: 1) We actually get started with the Jakarta Web Components sub-project. 2) We can defer discussion of which other parts of Jakarta move there. 3) We create a logical home for the now-Struts-independent Tiles. While Tiles is a powerful templating framework, it is actually a fairly small code base, making it a good candidate for an independent web component. It is still being developed, so we would not be seeding Jakarta Web Components with a dormant component. Several of the Struts committers (many of whom are already Jakarta committers) would come here to continue working on Tiles, and to help build the Jakarta Web Components sub-project. Once Jakarta Web Components is up and running, it would, of course, be up to the various communities surrounding Commons and Taglibs components, and potentially other Jakarta sub-projects, as to whether or not they choose to join the new sub-project. The goal of this proposal is simply to seed the sub-project and get the ball rolling. Comments? -- Martin Cooper [1] http://struts.apache.org/struts-action/struts-tiles/
