STATUS There is a special term for when projects split, "fork", but no term for when they merge together to create one project. If there were such a term, this would be the perfect time to use it. The OpenEJB development effort is moving directly into the genetics of the Apache Geronimo project, which will be hybrid of ideas consisting of the best all projects involved have to offer. All the active OpenEJB code committers support the Geronimo project and are very excited to add our experience and ideas to the mix.
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/geronimo-proposal.html We will continue our commitment to users and will accept patches, fix bugs, and issue patch releases as normal. All current OpenEJB users will be undisturbed. The difference being that all major development efforts by the OpenEJB team will take place under the Geronimo project. We will do our absolute best to provide a clean and easy migration path from OpenEJB to Apache Geronimo. This would optimally be done by plugging in OpenEJB into Geronimo, in which case there would be no work required by users to migrate. As the Geronimo code is still incubating, it's too early to say how this would be done, but as OpenEJB can be plugged into just about anything it should not be a problem. People who do not use OpenEJB usually cite lack of the full J2EE stack as the reason. Participating in Geronimo is our solution to that issue. RELEASE 1.0 There is a significant amount of work in the 1.0 development branch (cvs HEAD branch), which includes a web-based administration tool like the one that comes with the Tomcat loader. Tim Urberg is heading up that development. The webadmin (as it's been dubbed) has a deployment GUI, a tool for color coding and searching log files, a system property viewer, and a config file viewer. Tim has plans for a Castor XML mapping file generator as well, we'll see how much encouragement he gets from the community he gets on that idea. A few kind words go a long way for people who don't work for money. His plan is to setup a demo version of it and collect feedback right away rather than releasing it raw. We did the same thing with the first Tomcat/OpenEJB integration strategy and we ended up with some critical feedback. So, OpenEJB 0.9.0, the first release with Tomcat integration support, actually featured a complete rewrite of an integration add-on we piloted on the list with 0.8.3. More Tomcat features would be great for that release. Off the top of my head, I see that an org.openejb.spi.SecurityService implementation that wraps the tomcat-user.xml file functionality would be a huge win. This all depends on the community, which leads to the next section. RECRUITING The Tomcat/OpenEJB community is definitely growing. There aren't enough committers on the project to support all the users and fixes/improvements that need to take place. We always encourage people to become part of the development team, but now more than ever. It would be fabulous to have a half-dozen more committers to lead the community in support, fixes, enhancements, docs, administration (a Wiki would be great), and development. There are a great deal of Tomcat/OpenEJB users who are very qualified to do this. Part of OpenEJB's focus is ease of use, so you need not be a J2EE expert to participate -- in many ways it's better if you're not as you can identify with and cater to the majority of users out there. We've already added Jeremy Whitlock as a committer, we need more more more. If you've ever complained about some part of OpenEJB to your friends, you're the perfect person to come on board as you have a keen sense of what other users need. As you'll learn from open source, some things take a long time to do, others are very easy and make a huge impact on the users. There are an unlimited number of trivial things that can be done to bring real value to the average day of a user. Seeing them is the hard part. The more eyes, the better the quality of the software. We need more eyes with commit privileges! We need you! Anyone interested, speak up! Life is too short to be shy. Best regards, David Blevins (a proud parent of the all-grown-up OpenEJB) ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ http://OpenEJB.sf.net OpenEJB-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openejb-user
