In the midst of a recent mosh-pit thread, someone asked "What can I do to change the direction of the Apache Struts project?"
The answer would be to summarize the concerns raised in the thread and create a coherent proposal that lays out another course. (An obvious place to do that would be the Apache Struts wiki.) When ready, call for a vote on dev@ as to the proposal. That's how directions like Shale and WebWork/Action2 were set, and if anyone wanted to change these directions, simply follow the same protocol. Now, I should note that the binding votes on the Shale subproject and WebWork/Action2 proposals were unanimous, with no dissents or waffling by PMC members. To succeed, a proposal for an alternative direction would need to be compelling. Of course, if someone felt the Apache Struts PMC was being unreasonable, intransient, and insular, or has otherwise become a roadblock to innovation, then someone could appeal to the ASF Board of Directors. The PMC serves at the pleasure of the board, and the board can retire or reconstitute the PMC as it sees fit. For more about how the ASF works, see * http://apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html Though, right now, the method behind our madness goes something like this: * Both the ASF and Apache Struts are standard-bearers, and, like it or not, JSF is a designated Java standard. Given volunteers, we believe that it is appropriate that Apache Struts provide JSF developers with a MVC framework to fill in the gaps left by JSR 127, just like Struts Action fills in the gaps left by the servlet platform * The original Struts Action codebase suffers from design deficiencies that would take some effort to remedy. Since neither the ASF nor Apache Struts advocates "Not Invented Here Syndrome", we chose to adopt WebWork as Struts Action 2 -- much the same way that tens of thousands of teams adopted Struts Action over a homebrew framework. * Struts Action 1 has a significant installed base, and so long as there are volunteers to do the work, the codebase will remain open for improvement, in the Apache Way. It's no coincidence that these three bullets represent the three options every Java engineer faces today: * Do we try JSF? * Do we try a second-generation framework? * Do we stay the course? Since we are working engineers, with day jobs at which we write real applications, we are providing our own alternative to each option. Is that good marketing? I really don't know. I didn't come here for the marketing, I came here for the engineering. The marketing I'll leave to the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Sun, and Zend. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
