At 06:19 30/1/01 -0500, Sam Ruby wrote: >What I am trying to do now is determine if there is, in fact a "Jakarta >community". People working together towards common goals. It was my >assertion that there was, but I must say that at the moment I'm a bit >underwhelmed by the number of responses to this query. > >Suggestions welcome.
Time to respond then ;) A while back someone mentioned the phrase "the Jakarta Generation" which presumably was a play on "the GNU generation" (which itself is a play on "the X generation" and/or "the next generation"). Which to me saids to me that the Jakarta group was making a play for becoming the standard organisation for free java based software. From what I see it looks like that is gradually happening. Ant has become the defacto java build system, the regular expression libraries are slowly gaining acceptance and some of the xml parsers (crimson and/or xerces) will more than likely become THE standard. I see this as a good thing. I would love to see this become more the case. I would actually be damn happy if some of the other free java software groups were asked to join/merged in etc. Some of the exolabs projects are great, as are infzone/prowler, as is a few other standalones such as * dnsjava * escher (x in java) * hypersonique (the db) * wiredx (x serrver in java + other infrastructure) * merlot (xml editor) * mindterm (ssh + telnet client) * telnetd (telnet server) * httpunit (unit testing for webpages - like gtest but much better) * javaldap (really fast directory server in java) * ozone (xml-db) * the java search engine (forget it's name) * remote-tea (ONC-RPC) * jcifs (Java-CIFS/Samba client library) ...etc... I would also love to see work done from within Sun/JCP to free up the RI of other standard extentions and perhaps worked on under apaches umbrella. However that above assumes that the best part of apache is the code/resources where this is not true - it is the people. So I guess thats where the rub is ;) However I would still like to see some of this moving forward (if at a slower rate). So what does this have to do with above? Well I guess what I am trying to say is that currently jakarta is out of focus. It began as a haven for servlet engine and grew. The first thing to do would be to refocus and recoup and figure out what is going on, which bits are good, which are bad etc. This may mean assigning projects to incubator status, adopting/discussing/modifying JDDs rules for revolutionaries etc. After that I would love to see option 2 occur. (ie differentiate to a devtools.apache.org or whatever). However I would still like to see a group overseeing the overall direction of the java projects. However if this is not the vision then moving ant to tigris (or something similar) would be an acceptable alternative. So I guess it comes down to the question - Does Jakarta/Apache want to position itself as the free Java guys? If so lets make it happen. If not and you want to maintain the community as focused as it is now then thats kewl aswell ;) Though if we do go down the "World domination of Free Java" path then it would be very very good to be compatable with GPL so the majority of the community can work with it. I know there will be some friction regarding this point but I think it is essential if we are going to grow into this role. Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
