Hi guys, It's time for the December Tiles board report. Honestly, unless I've forgotten something, there's really not much to report. Mck's article/blog post is about the only news that happened this month. I think it's time for us to do a little navel-gazing and see where the project is headed.
It's clear to me that, unless I take a real hobbyist personal interest in Tiles, it's highly unlikely that I will ever contribute more from a development perspective. When I first started using Tiles as a Struts subproject it was my favorite aspect to Struts. I had really high hopes as we started to break Tiles free from Struts' underpinnings and it became its own project. Then my work situation changed and using Tiles with my day job was no longer a possibility. At this point we don't even use Java technologies in our web view layer and I don't see that going back any time soon. As for my personal time, I just have too many interests that take precedence - not the least of which are a wife and 4 kids :-) So... while I still love what we've been able to do with Tiles, it's time for me to admit that my life is not likely to take me back in a direction where I will be a regular contributor. As I've said before, I'm still willing to continue on to help verify and vote on releases and take care of the administrative minutia (what little there is) for as long as the team would have me to do so. I'm also willing to step down as PMC chair and let someone else have a go at it if you'd prefer. The bigger question that I think we need to address in the upcoming board report, though, is whether we believe the Tiles project itself should continue. The idea of a "project" denotes ongoing work. When an Apache project is "finished" and no further movement is expected, it generally goes into the Attic. I'd have to look further to see if the Attic will remove all existing releases of the software or if it just means there will not be any further releases. It doesn't necessarily mean the project is "dead". It can be forked to Google code or anywhere else. It can even be started back up as an Apache project via the Incubator. So, what are your thoughts? Do you still use Tiles enough to keep pushing it forward? Or is it time to call it quits and move on to other things? If you'd like to keep moving forward the what do you think we should do to attract a bigger community? Thanks, Greg
