"Kevin A. Burton" wrote:
> I am not making an official statement... I think that we are on the slippery
> slope towards Apache becoming a "dumping ground" (don't take offense to this
> phrase, I couldn't come up with a better one).
>
> I can see the logic behind your thinking but if this mechanism of extension
> keeps happening Apache will have a lot of new projects :)
I understand your point, Kevin. Though, in practice, we *already* have a
lot of "projects" like J2EEUnit at Jakarta. The problem is they are
buried inside of larger projects, and are not reaching their full
potential. The Commons is designed so that these smaller codebases can
be maintained independently and reused throughout Jakarta, and
elsewhere. ("The unit of reuse is the unit of release.") Other packages
in the wings are bean utilities and a database connection pool.
Yes, this will result in there being more individual packages that
people can download from Jakarta, and use within their own projects. But
the goal is to actually *reduce* the amount of code we have to create
and maintain, by decoupling useful packages from larger frameworks.
Without the Commons, J2EEUnit might end up being donated to Apache
anyway, but then buried within Struts or some other larger subproject.
What will make a big difference is the Commons directory, which I hope
to get started on next month.
-Ted.
