Gentlemen, having followed the recent discussions on the prospects of Qt Jambi in this list pretty closely I cannot help but share my point of view on this.
IMHO Trolltech Qt Jambi has had and does have one serious problem. However, this problem is not of a technical kind. Technically Jambi is an extremely valueable addition to the Java world, it's simply the best desktop UI framework available for Java. Swing is a nice try but has never really been used by it's creators/maintainers for anything but small demo apps, and it shows. SWT can match Qt for performance but falls behind in every other dimension (elegance, extensiveness, extensibility...). Trolltech has been developing Qt for many years, lots of software has been written on top of it, it has matured and is well maintained. Using the existing Qt C++ codebase to fill the Java desktop UI framework void was an excellent idea and I think (even though there might still be some bugs here and there) Gunnar, Eskil and the others have done a really good job making it work. The reason that Qt Jambi is facing problems is not a technical one. IMHO Trolltech has done a truly terrible job with Jambi MARKETING. Being a software development company it seems Trolltech has not put enough focus on selecting the right people for its marketing/PR functions. Let me give you three points to support my case: 1. The name. "Qt Jambi". Sorry guys, but "Jambi" is a truly terrible name for an large, enterprise class framework of sophisticated software. It sounds like something I would give my kids to play with. A toy. Cute, small, sweet. Nothing serious. Something out of a Disney movie. A powerful, mature, reliable and solid piece of software cannot be called "Jambi". Whoever made that decision must have been out of his mind. Something like "QTJ" or "JQT" or even just a simple "Qt for Java" would have been A LOT better. 2. Creating visibility, fostering adoption, seeding a community Three crucial marketing tasks. Three complete fails. Jambi has been released more than 1.5 years ago and I bet more than 98% of Java developers have never heard of it. If you look at java forums, blogs and the ever recurring "SWT vs. Swing" discussions you will not see people pointing to Qt for rescue. Not because they think Qt is not up for the task. Simply because they don't know about it. What has Trolltech done to create visibility for Jambi? Apart from good old advertising (both on- and off the web) I could think of visiting and speaking at big java events, organize contests, give out prizes for the best Jambi app, recruiting and supporting "lamp post" projects, embracing the java centric academia, ... whatever. Jambi doesn't even have its own proper website. It has a reference documentation pages. If it does have a "reference projects" list somewhere I haven't found it. There is no community. As some of you have pointed out, traffic on this list is extremely low for a project with the punch potential of Qt for Java. This is not the fault of Gunnar or Eskil who I think do an excellent job on their end. It's a MARKETING job to reach out to the target group, get them excited and bring them on. 3. Communication. The prime example for the serious lack of professionalism in Trolltech marketing/PR is the press release issued on Feb. 19th (and now featured prominently on second place in the google results for a search for "Qt Jambi"). The content consists of three main points: - Trolltech will reduce resources dedicated to Jambi. - Jambi will be put under LGPL. - Trolltech will "host and help maintain a community-driven Qt Jambi implementation" To me this sound like two good news and one bad one. The second point is excellent news! Now, if you had to choose a title for that press release, what would it be? I would think something like "Qt Jambi opened up to community" or "Qt Jambi community to receive more focus" or anything else highlighting the positive points. Instead Trolltech decided to go for "Qt Software to discontinue Qt Jambi after 4.5 release". To me this reads like bad news. Really bad news. A tomb stone. Over and out. That's it. Done. Whoever in their right mind and interest in seeing Jambi prosper would issue a press release with that title? This is a stab in the back of all the Trolltech developers who have spent many months building the great Qt Java bridge available today. And it's the most effective countermeasure to any effort put into the third content point. It will take an enormous amount of work reverting the damage done by that PR title. IMHO there are a lot of opensource projects that do a much better job in marketing themselves than Trolltech has done with Qt Jambi. I can understand that a tech company has a tech focus (and I do think the Trolltech people know their stuff with regard to anything related to code) and that they might lack some competence in non-tech functions. However, I would think that maybe Nokia, being the mother and a consumer brand company with HUGE marketing experience, should be able to offset at least some of the deficiencies. Now, what does it all mean for the ones of us who have decided to adopt Qt Jambi despite its name and because of all its great qualities? I for my part will continue to use what is available and work around any bugs that I might still be discovering. The existing versions offer much more to me than any other Java alternative. And as long as this continues to be the case I will continue to use Qt Jambi. With a potential Jambi 5.0 or without. I hope Gunnar, Eskil and the others will manage to leave the codebase in a stable state with most of the known bugs addressed. In that case there is no reason not to use it. However, officially it will be dead, murdered by marketing incompetence. With cheers from the Black Forest, Mathias
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