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I have a feeling that Avalon, and specifically Merlin is focusing too much on
the enterprise. I know that the enterprise features are necessary for some
folks, but others simply do not need it. It never really had simplicity, and
to be honest I can't tell what it does and does not do. I know of a couple of
people who are concerned (and will remain nameless until they choose not to be).
Concerning Merlin I once had the impression that some of the feature it offers are cool (i.e. default configurations aka profiles IIRC) but others aren't that much (i.e. security). ATM I'm not in need for a standalone container as most of my server apps are running with Phoenix' last version much better because it has JMX and that's much more important to me than other features Merlin offers. Looking at the current commit rate of the development it will take month until I will suggest my customers to migrate from Phoenix to Merlin because of its endless refactoring cycles (admittedly I might be totally wrong but this is the impression it gives me).
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Another thing that scares me is the rate of mutation for Merlin. You may know
what it does this week, but come back to it a couple weeks later and everything
is different. There are hundreds of commit messages that go by all the time,
and it is difficult for me to try to keep up with what is really going on.
Thats what I meant by 'endless refactoring impression'.
The questions I have are this (for those who have not seen this earlier):
1) Am I alone in my concerns?
Definitively not. I second your concerns.
2) If not, how should we start refactoring Merlin to make it what we all need?
* please note that development should be able to continue while refactoring
occurs.
To be honest, I have no idea as it has grown too fast for me, too many features that I can get an idea only by looking at the documentations.
3) What about the guy with simple needs? What are we going to do for him?
Thanks there is Fortress.
4) What about extensibility? We need this if we are to survive. Right now I
get the feeling that Merlin is an all or nothing approach. Not a pick and
choose the feature set approach.
I actually can see the need for a standalone container that fills the Phoenix hole (or being a successor of it) but as a 'user' of Avalon code most of the time I'd like to see a prioritized feature list combined with relases they are expected to be available (I do know OS projects cannot promise any dates so dates are really relative but releases and their feature implementations is a way to go for it).
PS: I really do not want to offend anybody. Just take this as the feelings from an interested Avalon user/developer since years.
-- Giacomo Pati Otego AG, Switzerland - http://www.otego.com Orixo, the XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com
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