Hi Everybody, As the committer who created the last several releases and many many updates (see the log), here is my take on this question:
Timeline is definitely a current, live, useful, open source project: * Most importantly, the true status of open source projects are really defined by their community, not by the software. And Timeline, I'm proud to say, has a large and vibrant community of people who actively help out others when they have Timeline questions. (Via this mailing list.) -- I can't emphasize enough, how important and wonderful this community is to the project. It is the community that makes a project come alive and stay alive. Also: * The software is used by many many private, public, commercial and non-commercial sites around the world. * The software solves a real and active problem very well. * The software is an important part of a funded MIT project, Exhibit. To everyone who has helped out someone else via this email list: Thank you Thank you Thank you! But...as noted by MacKenzie, Timeline development is not currently funded by MIT or anyone else. And, most of the people interested in Timeline want to be users of the software, not developers of it. (That's fine.) Also, many of the people interested in further developing the software don't have the expertise or time for what is needed. Eg, if you look at the changes log, you'll see some prior commits that I had to roll back when a change broke the software. This is why I created the test pages. And more frequently, there have been code submissions to me that would not work or would break the test pages. (The changes were submitted via email or the bugs/issues system.) Plus, integrating a patch into an svn source tree takes a lot of time if you want to carefully test the proposed changes. So one or two poor submissions meant that I realized I had to carefully test *all* of the submissions. Since my time for Timeline is small and decreasing, I had to prioritize the issues that were important to me. Sorry. Note that Timeline is what I call "systems-level" software. It is a large, sophisticated, object-oriented, multi-browser software base. Making good forward progress with the Timeline code base requires a 4 year CS degree or equivalent, at a bare minimum. Remember that the sw was written and then re-written by *extremely* bright MIT PhD folks. This software base isn't for a newbie! (The most surprising submissions have been from people who tried to work on the minimized Javascript library instead of using the real source. -- What were they thinking?) WHAT'S NEEDED / NEXT STEPS While the number of qualified developers interested in the Timeline project is few, it is very important to provide them with the maximum encouragement! And more importantly, the only way to see if someone's proposed submission is good is to have a better submission/code management system. The good news is that such a system exists, git with github. Using the git system, anyone can create their own version of the source tree, make changes to it, then propose to the project management that their changes be integrated back into the main trunk. This is how the Yahoo people run their YUI project. They have the same problem of a sophisticated code base that needs to be carefully curated. So the next step, in my opinion, is to move (not fork!) the svn tree of Timeline and the "Ajax" tree (see the source) to GitHub. But I need the buy-in and approval of the project leaders David H, David K, and Stefano before doing that. I'll email them. PRIORITIES / NEW RELEASES Yes, certainly the current 2.3.1 release is a bit long in the tooth and needs to be replaced. My personal priorities are: 1) Move to github 2) Get the release scripts tuned up and working in the new environment. 3) Update to current version of JQuery 4) No longer use the "auto-magic" startup code that loads the libraries and adds them to the dom. Why: current best practice for quickest page display is to load JS libraries at the end of the page load, not at the beginning (as stock Timeline does). It is also better to let the website developer put all Timeline scripts together into one bigger file rather than smaller files that are auto-loaded. Eg a current Timeline page loads 4 JS files (ajax, ajax bundle, timeline bundle, signal). This should be reduced to 1 or 2 (JQuery would be the second file.) After that, there are many other bugs to be fixed and features to be added. Hopefully the community will step up! -- The github move would really help to enable this. Or I or someone else could be paid to work on it (that's already happened in the past.) Comments? Questions? Regards, Larry Kluger ps. I read every bug/issue submission and update. But I just don't have much time to work on the sw these days. The sw continues to work very well for me and my projects--I use the current version myself. pps. Unfortunately, I'm only able to read the mailing list infrequently. On Mar 28, 9:41 am, codebeneath <[email protected]> wrote: > Is this to say there are several people who have commit access to > Timeline codebase who are addressing filed issues or possibly applying > patches provided via the issue tracker? Of particular interest we > have, we think that the orthoginal scrolling capability alone is > significant enough to warrent a 2.4.0 release. Is there anyone > available who could cut such a release from existing trunk? > > Thanks, > > Jeff > > On Mar 26, 7:34 am, mackenzie <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > > > > > To amplify this a bit, there is no active Time project nowadays > > (hasn't been for a couple of years now) but there is an active > > community, as Alexey says, who use Timeline and maintain the code. The > > only active project going on now that I'm aware of is Exhibit 3 > > (simile-widgets.org/exhibit3). > > > MacKenzie > > > On Mar 25, 1:22 am, jqueryui-vienna <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Hi, > > > > I just wanted to know about the current status of the simile timeline > > > project. The last commit to its svn trunk was in 2009, so the question > > > arises if if still is active. > > > > Are there any planned releases or some roadmap? > > > > Franz -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SIMILE Widgets" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/simile-widgets?hl=en.
