On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Demetrios Kyriakis <[email protected]> wrote: >> haven't seen any movement there in months, years... why >> >> not work on that other well-supported project instead?' Or to paraphrase >> the well known quote - "contributors contribute to those projects who help >> themselves"... >> >> ...is it just me? > > No, it's not just you. > To me this project looks quite abandoned, and to express it more plastically > , it's "movements" are of a "chicken without a head" , and it doesn't have > much until it's over either.
apache projects don't use a dictatorial model until the community decides on a direction, development just happens which begs the question: what do people want from james? > One could say that this shouldn't be such a big problem, since it's open > source, (there's source code and stuff), right? > Well for me it is, and mainly because it's too complicated for me to be able > to be useful somehow, or "fix it myself". contributions take many forms. for example, as pointed out about the documentation is old. if you're happier with a pay for model, then RedHat have a professionally developed email server which is of comparable sophistication to james > This is why I switched most of my email server installations to JES: > http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaemailserver > > An extremely simple (one could say quite primitive cause it doesn't do too > much) mail server that seem to just work. > It has even a few things 2.3.1 does not have (or are not simple to setup): > - setup in a few minutes even by a non-developer > - very small - only a few KB (also consumes few resources) > - multi-domain support out of the box (just enumerate them) > - settings changes on the fly (without restarting the server) > > The biggest advantage for me however is that it is *very* small and > "non-abstract" so I can quickly understand it and "fix it myself". > The loading tests I've made also shown me that it can handle without > problems what most small and medium companies need. best of luck :-) one of the hardest decisions to take is whether to start writing from scratch a replacement for a mature product. it's hard to know whether enough new developers can be attracted to gain the momentum you need to overtake more mature projects. then there's the problem that as more functions are added, any problems with the original designs are revealed. fully featured email servers are non-trivial. it takes time to prove them in production. 2.3.x has been proved and is mature (which is why it's not longer actively developed). but there's a tradeoff. lots of features means lots more code and a much bigger footprint. so james is big and complex. servers with comparable features tend also to be big and complex. my personal preferance is for an OSGi based mail server with development switching mostly to libraries. this would allow users to mix and match. if people are interested in pushing james for the SME market then the OfBiz project are the people to talk to. a stripped down version of james 3.0 with easy configuration may well be of interest to them. they have developers and a lot of knowledge of that sector. so, if someone wanted to jump in and arrange collaborations, i think it might work out well. - robert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
