On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 20:34 -0700, Jihoon Kim wrote: > Hi, > > Since I wanted to have a clear understanding of community's viewpoint > of whether the contribution should be part of MyFaces subproject, I am > starting this vote. > > The contribution details are noted within the following JIRA link => > > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250 > > In a nutshell, it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex > components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the > components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create > the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the > components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and > etcetera. > > In the above discussion "Adobe Flex components as MyFaces JSF > components", one note that was raised is that Adobe Flash Player is > proprietary while Adobe Flex has been open sourced. > > Personally, since I did see an another project within Apache that did > create Adobe PDF and since Adobe Flash Player is ubiquitous; I guess I > underplayed the fact that Adobe Flash Player is proprietary. > > Anyway, thanks to everyone and I will wait to hear the consensus > regarding this contribution!!! >
-1 Reason #1: This code has no purpose unless all users of the webapp have a Flash player installed. But Flash is a proprietory product. There are attempts to build free flash players by reverse-engineering Adobe's proprietory player but AFAIK none of them will be suitable for use with this code in the near future [1]. I don't feel it appropriate for an ASF project to host a project that requires a proprietory viewer from a specific vendor. [2] Note that HTML and PDF are standards. And if this were just a new *renderer* for the standard jsf components, the situation might be different. But this is (I believe) a new set of JSF components that are specifically for Flex/Flash. Reason #2: This is an area of major technical churn at the moment. Other technologies in this area include svg, canvas, javafx, etc. In a couple of years the recommended tool may be something other than Flex/Flash (well, I really hope so!). In which case this project will then be a maintenance burden after the majority of interest has moved on. Reason #3: The development community is not (so far) very large. Jihoon Kim's initial code looks nicely written, but it was written as a "hobby" project rather than being driven by any long-term goal. I'd feel more comfortable if some people with open-source experience could give a good reason why they would be willing to commit to maintaining this project long-term (several years). [1] If anyone knows that this is not true, then please say so. It's just my guess... [2] Yes, I know, hypocritical from a project that runs only on Sun Java :-). But we're slowly getting out of that trap... Regards, Simon
