Ted Husted wrote:
>
> > The desire to work together is core to my thesis that
> > there is a Jakarta community here.
>
> There often seems to be an assumption that our resources,
> or community, is limited. There are a great number of
> Java developers in the world, and our numbers grow every
> day. A project like Struts, with a clear internal focus
> on J2EE compatability can easily attract developers that
> would not otherwise contribute. I happen to be one.
>
> Are we building a cathedral, or a bazaar?
Hmm. I'm not sure how you got that from my statement, but lets go with
that for a moment.
Many have noticed that I personally enjoy the diversity that exists in
scripting languages, template frameworks, and the like. To me, that's not
the issue.
Open source is about scratching itches.
It irritated me that PHP is somewhat under the Apache umbrella, and so is
Tomcat, but one couldn't make them work together.
It irritated me that Tomcat originally prereqed Sun's parser and many
Apache projects prereqed Xerces, making them difficult to run together.
Some progress has been made, but some projects (like xml-batik and
xml-axis) haven't quite gotten the message.
Now it irritates me that one has to have separate database pools for
Struts, JetSpeed, and Cocoon. I don't honestly care how beautiful the
internal APIs are, or compatible with some corporate strategy the solution
is, I just want to be able to share database connections. Is that so bad?
Unfortunately, the last itch requires more than individual effort - it
requires teamwork. Making the core functionality pluggable, or wrappering
it with a J2EE facade or a Avalon facade, or even making sure that Struts
remains a single jar are mere technical problems. It is the recognition
that out there in the chaos that is open source, somebody will want to
include more than one subproject in their workspace that I desire more
people to see.
One other thing to ponder. Sourceforge is a random collection of open
source projects, each doing their own thing. Some successful. Some
abandoned. In Jakarta, some of us have worked hard to produce something
different - a community centered around the building of related software.
Perhaps we are deluding ourselves. You tell me.
- Sam Ruby
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