Your "speaking for myself" part, describes my current status perfectly. And you're right, the board should be aware. I had hoped things would change, but our clients seek ajax now, and i've been shifted increasingly to client-side work. Composing pages on the backend is becoming less important almost daily. I see no likelihood that i'll ever have reason to participate in Tiles beyond my current level. Even my time for participation in the Velocity community may atrophy as this shift in our development and my responsibilities therein continues.
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:38 PM, Greg Reddin <[email protected]> wrote: > Here's my draft report for the September board meeting. Please offer comments. > > Thanks, > Greg > > Releases > > We have made two releases this quarter. 2.1.3 is the latest GA > release.It is a bugfix release that includes a fix to a security > problem documented here: > > http://tiles.apache.org/framework/security/security-bulletin-1.html > > We also release the first version of the 2.2.x series. Apache Tiles > 2.2.0 is an alpha-quality release. This series adds several new > features, including: > > * Native support for Freemarker and Velocity > * Support for pattern matching using regular expressions. > * OGNL support and MVEL support in Tiles definition files, when > specifying attributes and templates. > * Ready to use configuration classes to ease startup with minimal coding. > > Additionally, 2.2.0 removes some backwards-compatibility features. > These features allowed Tiles to work with older architectures (Java > 1.4/Servlet 2.4) that are no longer supported. > > Community > > As I've noted in the past I am somewhat concerned about the stability > of the Tiles community. We have no trouble mustering up the votes > needed for releases. Development discussions continue to produce > multiple points of view. But the development and release work is still > performed by one PMC member. The truth of the matter is that if this > developer stopped working on Tiles there would be no further progress. > There is a healthy amount of traffic on the user list, but this > developer also answers the bulk of the questions there. So if he were > to leave the project and no one stepped up to take his place that > activity would come to a halt as well. > > The rest of us are still interested in the project, but it does not > affect our daily work to the extent that we are compelled to > contribute in a concrete way. Speaking for myself, I've gotten so far > away from day-to-day development of Tiles that I can't even offer > intelligent responses to user questions anymore. This is not to say > that development continues unchecked. I'm still subscribed to the > commits and issues lists and I keep track of the traffic there. > > It's my opinion that Tiles now lives in more of a niche market than it > once did. When Tiles was more tightly integrated with Struts it had a > lot more visibility. Most web developers who are still using Java MVC > web frameworks seem to be using frameworks that have more integrated > templating frameworks. Tiles is a standalone templating engine that is > not tied to a specific framework. Therefore it has less visibility > than some of the others. There could also be the impression that Tiles > is largely "done" as far as new features are concerned and there's not > a whole lot of room for revolutionary innovation. > > I do I believe that Tiles still offers some compelling features. This > is probably a point where a corporate project would be sundowned. As > long as there is still someone around to do the work and we still have > at the people to vet the releases I'm willing to continue supporting > the project. I don't see Tiles as a candidate for the Attic at this > time, but if development stops it may be in the future. At this time I > just felt it's important for the Board to be aware of our status. It's > worth noting that we have not made a significant effort to reach out > beyond our community to seek growth. >
