RE: Collaborative Development (not Cat and Dog)
Well, I do NOT care about the fact that he is not documenting Tomcat instead since: - He already does a lot; - He is not alone at Tomcat, and others (even me or you) could work on the documentation too. We just have other priorities; - He as all the right to decide what he does on his free time and to have other priorities too; - Apache is not paying him and it is not up to us to discuss what Sun does or does not care about; Just to make clear that what I DO care about is that Craig is blaming all that mess on Tomcat 3.3 instead of pointing the real issue - the lack of documentation. More people do listen to Craig than to me, so: - It is much more productive when he points out the real issues (which in this case are quite obvious); - And it is much more nocive when he points on the wrong direction. I still stick with my statement that I DO admire Craig's work. But: - No one is perfect; - People tend to have a less clear vision of facts about something they are too involved with. Anyway, errors can be made, but they usually also can be fixed. Have fun, Paulo -Original Message- From: Jon Stevens [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 6:26 PM on 5/15/01 3:46 AM, Paulo Gaspar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My evaluation of facts is: - There is almost no documentation on Tomcat, either on web pages or under a more formal format. Tomcat is much more complex than Velocity (a Jakarta project I know well) but its documentation looks pathetic when compared to Velocity's. IMO, this is the _obvious_ cause for that Tomcat users confusion that shows at the USER mailing list; Now that isn't fair. Craig is just overly busy trying to document Struts so that JSP can take over the world! Unfortunately, no one will be able to run Struts because they can't figure out how to use Tomcat. Funny Catch-22 if you ask me. :-) ... -jon
Re: Collaborative Development (not Cat and Dog)
on 5/15/01 3:46 AM, Paulo Gaspar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My evaluation of facts is: - There is almost no documentation on Tomcat, either on web pages or under a more formal format. Tomcat is much more complex than Velocity (a Jakarta project I know well) but its documentation looks pathetic when compared to Velocity's. IMO, this is the _obvious_ cause for that Tomcat users confusion that shows at the USER mailing list; Now that isn't fair. Craig is just overly busy trying to document Struts so that JSP can take over the world! Unfortunately, no one will be able to run Struts because they can't figure out how to use Tomcat. Funny Catch-22 if you ask me. :-) Interestingly enough, Craig is not marked as a single volunteer for any parts of the project he started. Maybe it is just assumed he has to volunteer for everything. http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/todo-1.1.html :-) -jon -- If you come from a Perl or PHP background, JSP is a way to take your pain to new levels. --Anonymous http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/ymtd/ymtd.html
Re: Collaborative Development (not Cat and Dog)
On Wed, 9 May 2001, Paulo Gaspar wrote: Besides developers and their own itches, there is another group whose interests ought to be considered - USERS of Tomcat. If you don't have any, then it becomes a much less interesting project to work on. And we've done a pretty good job at confusing people about what the Tomcat road map is. If the user community were to abandon Tomcat, it wouldn't matter much what we do on the development side. Why are USERS that different from developers in this case? By USERS, I'm talking about the people that use Tomcat as a product, and who don't usually even WANT to think about the Tomcat source code. They don't include folks who want to think about participating in Tomcat's development -- they just want a cool servlet + JSP container. For a sense of perspective on the Tomcat user community, consider the following: Just off the main Apache web site, Tomcat binary downloads (in various release and nightly build formats) run from 50,000 to 100,000 downloads per month. That doesn't count mirror sites (official and unofficial), people who download Tomcat as part of other app servers, people who download Tomcat as part of development tools packages, and people who download the J2EE RI (which includes Tomcat as its web layer). At the moment, there are 2,236 subscribers to the TOMCAT-USER list, which is the largest Jakarta mailing list other than ANNOUNCEMENTS (~4,200). TOMCAT-DEV has 1,125 - many of them subscribed because they want to understand where Tomcat is going (a pretty smart way to figure that out, IMHO), not because they are contributing. (This trend is visible in other Jakarta projects as well -- lots and lots of downloads, user mailing lists at least double the size of the developer list, well-supported packages gaining users much faster than they gain developers, ...) If you want to understand why caring about users is important, go subscribe to TOMCAT-USER and start answering all of the plaintive calls for help. These people don't give a rip about the internal architecture - they are totally mystified by the absolutely horrible mess we've made of configuration, most especially for web connectors. We're talking about lots of people who are new to servlets and JSP, and often new to Java -- and we are erecting a huge wall in front of them, before they can productively use the software that we have been slaving over. This is Open Source. The developers are USERS trying to scratch their own itches. Developers, in terms of the comments I was making, are often Users as well -- but there's a whole bunch more Users than that. It's definitely open source, and we Developers are totally free to ignore the non-developer Users if we want to. And those Users are totally free to ignore our software and flock to other products whose developers care about them. If we were to chase everyone away, it doesn't matter how cool our software is any more -- it becomes irrelevant. For each USER that becomes a developer to scratch his own itch there are several other USERS with the same itches just waiting for the scratching solution to be ready. (*) One thing I had to learn while starting to use Open Source software (and that was recently - during 2000) was: 1) There is usually no fancy wrapped product with manual and you really have to get involved, subscribe the mailing lists and dive into the source code to understand some of the stuff you use; 2) You still have (much) faster answers for your problems, even having the option of participating in their solution. Whomever is aware of 2) is motivated to do 1). Whomever does 1) here, understands the 4.x versus 3.3 pros and cons and is able to make the best choice for his own case. No argument that developers can do what they want in an open source project. But, by MY definitions of the terms (since you're responding to what I said :-), there are orders of magnitude more Tomcat users in the world than there are Tomcat developers. IMHO, we have an obligation to care about them as well, and not selfishly focus on us. Corporations need to have a black on white clear statement, hiding or killing/loosing the advantages of Open Source's 'Software Darwinism' (which seems to me to have a good profits/cost balance). But this is not Sun's Tomcat Project, it is Apache's Jakarta Tomcat Project. Corporations got that message a couple years ago :-) By the way, I was an open source developer (see below) even before I joined Sun ... they hired me (at least in part) because of that. The others will always be the (prey) customers of the more traditional commercial software or are better paying loads of money to have some consultant thinking for them. (And the consultant might still be an Open Source adept.) There isn't any compelling benefit (to the user community) to have two active development branches, once the next generation branch matures. The 4.0
Re: Collaborative Development (not Cat and Dog)
On Wed, 9 May 2001, Craig R. McClanahan wrote: Just off the main Apache web site, Tomcat binary downloads (in various release and nightly build formats) run from 50,000 to 100,000 downloads per month. That doesn't count mirror sites (official and unofficial), people who download Tomcat as part of other app servers, people who download Tomcat as part of development tools packages, and people who download the J2EE RI (which includes Tomcat as its web layer). I would guess at least few of them are downloading and using tomcat3.x :-) Costin
Re: Collaborative Development (not Cat and Dog)
I feel a personal, moral, obligation to the thousands and thousands of people who download Tomcat in the hopes of having a servlet container that works, and who want to have confidence in a solid support and future +1 Very well put, for me it's the only reason I'm still subscribed to this list and working on tomcat. And of course, working with the great people on this list ( but unfortunately - and I'm sorry to say that - I don't think that alone would keep me on this project or offset the ugly ) Costin growth path -- and we (develoeprs) have not yet provided an unambiguous message to reassure them. Remember: most 3.3 people were not that motivated to work on Catalina, and because they worked (and keep working) on stuff for 3.3 that has common usefulness, 4.x now can benefit form it. If it was not for 3.3, maybe they were working on something else. Are you sure they would be converted to 4.x? And many USERS (like me) could be now investing on some other tool. Staying around because of 3.3, maybe they can be converted to 4.x AFTER 4.x proves its value. Remember, by my definitions you're a DEVELOPER, not a USER :-). Have fun, Paulo Gaspar (*) - Most of them much more silent and even less participative than myself. =;o) Craig
