Unfornutatly I lost my sourceforge password a very long time ago
and have since given up on their system ever giving my my password.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Leif W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <dynapi-dev@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Dynapi-Dev] Is this project dead?
>Andrew Gillett; [EMAIL PROTECTED]:25 -0500David King wrote:
There are PHP errors all over the web site. No word from any project admin. Last stable release was 2.5.7 in January 2002. Latest development release was 3.0 Beta 1 in June 2003. Virtually no activity on this mailing list since Octorber 2003. What happened that killed all activity on this project?
I have a few theories.
Yeah it's difficult to answer. It's difficult to read. I've always been on the fringes (since just before they went to SourceForge), not contributing too much but following along and doing what I can. Trying to figure stuff out has gotten a little more difficult. There are so many techniques used in the code in DynAPI 3 that it's hard to get my head around sometimes.
The administrators of the project seem to have all moved on and there doesn't seem to have been any effort made to find new volunteers to administer the project.
I'm not an admin, but I seem to be able to mess with (read, write-modify, write-new) most of the files in the web tree. I can read, write and create files within any given CVS module, but I have not tried creating new modules or removing the "mistake"/empty modules. Anyways, perhaps something more could be done to get more people involved?
Genuine cross-platform JavaScript gurus are not as common as you might think.
I used to be pretty good with using DynAPI 1, never really got the hang of DynAPI 2, and got away from the DynAPI during most of the DynAPI 2 life cycle. I came back at the end of DynAPI 2 and the beginning of DynAPI 3. I've got minimal understanding of DynAPI 3 I think. I sucessfully added a little widget thingy, and half-arsed some PHP/SODA stuff but never got around to completing or integrating submitted code. I always seem to get sidetracked, which is my own SNAFU, nothing to do with DynAPI. If I were working a specific job (pay or volunteer) and using this stuff with other people, I'd be less likely to be distracted. :)
There is a huge learning curve with DynAPI.
Ain't that the truth. It's actually not all that bad. It's just not always well documented.
DynAPI has an elegant object model that makes it much easier to build complex web applications.
That's a reason why it should be alive, not dead. ;-)
However its focus on supporting old browsers with strange event handling mechanisms (Netscape 4.7) means that parts of it are far more complicated than they would be if it only modern browsers were supported. This complexity means that you can't just take a JavaScript programmer off the street, ask them to work on the DynAPI core and expect anything to happen in a hurry.
I remember the heyday in 1999 with DynAPI 1 on the brand-new version 4 browsers. I remember discovering each week at least 5 subtle ways in which both IE and NN were broken, and another 5 ways in which they behaved differently. The differences were in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and even form submissions. (ex. NN4 used to submit an empty text field as two spaces, so server side scripts needed to handle this).
What alternatives are there? domapi (http://www.domapi.com/) is the most promising one I can find.
Another alternative that I recently came across is a thing called ProtoLayer (www.protolayer.com), which seems to have been inspired by the DynAPI approach. It's not open source, but it is free for commercial use. I must confess that I haven't actually used it myself yet, but it looks interesting.
If you're in business, you have to do what you have to do, and use whatever you get your hands on that can do what you want to do. It kills me that there are proprietary JavaScript libraries. I remeber being on the internet before there was JavaScript, and everyone was happy to share their clever bits of code with everyone else. It surprises me that there are no other comparable GPL/LGPL JavaScript libraries. Maybe all the more reason that it's important to keep this one going.
Leif
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