Let me add my voice to Steve's. While I have spent the better part of a year working full time on Axis, this state of affairs will not continue. While my company uses Axis in its products (which is why they paid for 2 full time developers, myself and Glen Daniels, to work on it), with the release of 1.0 and the current state of the software industry, they need us to work on other things.
There are lots of places where Axis needs work to make it better, faster, cleaner, or even just to implement functionality. I hope to help on in many of these areas as much as I can, but like Steve I expect most of my work to have direct relevance to my product teams needs. So, please consider grabbing a copy of IDEA (best Java IDE ever) and pitching in. As usual for an Open Source project, the more you do, the more responsibility you get. :-) Looking forward to working with you! -- Tom Jordahl Macromedia -----Original Message----- From: Steve Loughran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 2:54 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: 1.1 When? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Forbis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 11:14 Subject: 1.1 When? > Does anyone know when we will see an official 1.1 (or 1.01 as the dev list > was debating?) > I ask because 1.0 has the MAJOR bug with Custom Exceptions not working. I > know that I can use nightly builds to get around this (and they work), but I > would like to uses a version blessed setup in production. In the open source world, the dividing line between interim and product builds is a lot less distinct. While I am fond of stable releases for things I dont care about (log4j, tomcat, hsqldb, xerces, xalan, castor), I do like to hang off the nightly build for Axis as it is still a fairly raw product, and there are things like interop and security defects still getting found and fixed. Even if a point release came out, I'd be on the builds I made myself every day/hour for these reasons. If you look at what is going on in the source tree you will see that its fairly quiet; dims is the busiest developer, tom jordal is fairly active. james snell is reworking how messages are handled internally, I've been tweaking things to meet my pressing problems. James' work is significant enough that we would have to go through a beta cycle, though probably a shorter one (go straight to release candidates to encourage adoption). Given the need for a beta cycle, if we came out with an RC or beta drop in december, we could go to in a january product release. That would set a trend for quarterly releases, which is probably a good release frequency. This has not been discussed, just a personal opinion. Now, here comes a call for participation: Axis is a project whose quality depends on the contributions of all the developers and users. You are all programmers, and you should all be able to edit an HTML page. Which means you can work on the code, and if you dont feel confident with doing that, work on the documentation. So, please, use CVS to get the source, fix the problems you have, and post the changes as bugzilla patche. Read the docs, find the bits that are horribly wrong, fix them. And if you really have time on your hands, or want to learn about axis, pick some of the bugzilla reports and fix them. If you dont participate, who do you think will fix things? With more people participating in the development of the project, the faster the next release will ship, and the better it will be. I know everyone thinks they are too busy, we all too busy. But if you integrate axis fixing into your project as part of your dev process, you help your own app and axis. Its what I do: its why I rarely make any change that doesnt have tangible benefits to my own project. This may seem utterly selfish, but if there were more like me working on our own little problems, then we'd take more of the load off the few people that somehow manage to work on Axis full time. -steve
