I am in no way discounting what Ben, Freddy, Aaron, or anyone else has done. I appreciate what them and anyone else has done to get Stripes where it is today. But Stripes was Tim's idea and hence he *is* the founder of Stripes, no other way around it.
And I don't view Stripes as on its death bed. Hell, it was by far the best web framework four years ago when I found it and AFAIK that hasn't changed. I'm in agreement with you Will that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The framework itself is not the issue here, it is the *perception* of the framework that is the problem. And as we all know, perception is reality. Stripes does follow the "one thing well" philosophy, and it does it better than Spring MVC, JSF, Struts 2, or any current or future web framework. It's been said by others before, and I concur, that Stripes *is* the way to build action-based Enterirpse Java web applications. Stripes is solid, mature, and "well seasoned" as you put it Will, but that's not the perception of those who do not already use Stripes and are evaluating it from the outside. The lack of activity on the mailing list, the stagnent web site, the dwindling of code commits to SVN, absolutely no buzz or traction in the community whatsoever, all appear to be signs of just another open source project taking a graceful exit. When the reality is 1) everyone is so productive with Stripes there is nothing to discuss on the mailing list 2) the web site, though looking dated, has good documentation on how to do most things anyone would want/need to do with Stripes...throw in Freddy's book and again there is no need to ask Stripes questions on forums, mailing lists, Stack Overflow, etc. Everything is simple, intuitive, easy to use, and it just works. 3) People have been throwing around the idea of a 1.5.x or a 1.6 release, but honestly I don't know what else Stripes needs feature-wise to warrant another release. So the lack of code commits doesn't bother me a bit. 4) Creating buzz is the most difficult part to overcome, and always has been for Stripes. No one from the Spring community is going to do it because they're all invested in Spring MVC. Sun isn't going to do it because they're invested in JSF. Apache doesn't care, they have Struts and Struts 2. Groovy has Grails so that's out. Does Scala have a web framework? Without a doubt, Stripes makes it ridiculously easy to be taken up by new users and be productive in ways no other web framework can provide. So where are all those new users? Why in the hell is anybody, after taking a look at Stripes, choosing anything else over it? That's the part that bothers me the most. None of these issues is going to run me off and make me go RoR or whatever. In fact, I'm trying to bring Stripes into where I currently work as they're still on Struts 1.2.x. But of course no one here has heard of it, and the CTO who will make the ultimate decision has my word versus an entire community built around Spring MVC. Who do you think is going to win that battle? Ed Edward Smith Senior Software Developer 214-272-5225 (direct) [email protected] PeopleAnswers® Better Insight. Better People. Check out our blog: blog.peopleanswers.com CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE: This email (including any attachments) is confidential and may be protected by legal privilege. If you are not the intended recipient, be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the information contained herein is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender by replying to this message and then delete this message in its entirety. Thank you for your cooperation. -----Original Message----- From: Will Hartung [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 03, 2010 1:01 AM To: Stripes Users List Subject: Re: [Stripes-users] New Stripes Website Google Group (Repost) I think my ears are burning... On Sep 2, 2010, at 3:32 PM, Edward Smith wrote: > While I appreciate the enthusiasm and effort, right now my concern is not > with hashing out details to a new web site for Stripes. I was disappointed, > though not surprised, to learn that Tim is no longer involved and that is a > much bigger issue. Basically we're all on a ship without a captain and thus > have no idea where we're going. Oh, au contraire mon frere. (That's French. Does Freddy know french? He's from Canada. Isn't Canada in France? Maybe there's a reason I'm not on the Google Maps team....) I am certainly not one to downplay or disparage Tim's gift to us all and his original leadership. But, to be frank (not French), TIm has been away for a LONG time, and this project has not suffered because of it. It really hasn't. The foundation he left behind was rock solid, and the others involved (notably Ben, Freddy, and Aaron) have taken and have had the wheel for a some time, and navigated S.S. Stripes quite well. > Many successful Open Source projects have a name behind it: Spring - Rod > Johnson, Grails - Graeme Rocher, JBoss - Marc Fleury, Hibernate - Gavin King, > etc. Tim is/was the name behind Stripes. Many OSS projects are the result of the passion of one person, scratching that itch. But there are a lot of successful projects that are (publicly at least) "personality free". Rather they're led by a passionate community, whether something formal with committees and meetings and afternoon teas or something more ad hoc, such as what Stripes has. We have and have had several active folks involved in this project. Some have left, others stayed, some just lurk. To be honest, Tim has had his itch scratched, and it was starting to chafe. > What I am more interested in at this point is the formulation of a vision of > where Stripes needs to go and a very high-level plan on how to get there. As > the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Creating a new, > updated web site is a good high-level idea but there are a lot more top-level > issues to resolve than the web site. But that's the real conflict here. It's not lack of passion, lack of vision, or even lack of commitment. I'm in the "if it ain't broke..." camp. I'm one of the old school curmudgeons. If anything I am grateful that this project, whether by design, vision, or simply lack of resources, has been mostly static. Because it does follow the "one thing well" philosophy. Doing its one thing well, and sticking to it, is one of the charms of Stripes, as others have mentioned. It enables easy uptake by new users. It enables the folks that are working on it, to make the shiny bits gleam even brighter. It allows something like Freddy's book to have traction and longevity in the space, keeping its value. Imagine poor Freddy doing all that work to have Stripes 2.0 come out 6mos later and deprecate chunks of it. He'd have to have a FAQ "Confusing and worthless parts of my book because of 2.0 (THANKS A LOT GUYS)" constantly spammed to the mailing list. It's a strange phenomenon in software that code must be popular to be useful. That code can never be finished. Stripes last release and update is less than a year ago. 8-9mos. But "woe is us, Stripes is dying". Java 6 was release FOUR YEARS AGO. Holy crap! eeeeeeeeee NURSE! PADDLES! eeeeeee CLEAR *thump* eeeeeeeee 300! STAT! CLEAR! *thump* eeeeeeeeeeeee *click* That's it, that's all I can do. Pronounce it Dr. Gosling. Java is dead. Guess I better port our stuff to Fortran or something, you know, to stay relevant. IMHO, Stripes is not on its death bed. Or, if it is on its death bed, hell, it's ALWAYS been on its deathbed. Much hullabaloo was made for Stripes when 1.5 originally came out (I know, I hulla'd some of the baloo myself). That was 2 years ago for the initial 1.5 release. You know what else was going on two years ago? The overall Java community was more vibrant. Despite JEE 6, Seam, JPA 2, GlassFish v3, Tomcat 7, Spring 3, etc. etc. etc. from a COMMUNITY POV, Java is reaaaly quiet right now. So, beyond maintaining the framework, bug fixes, etc., there hasn't been a lot needed. If anything, 1.5 better enable Stripes to be "Self sustaining". And by that I mean more of the framework was laid bare and made available for the kids at home to add stuff to it. Like Stripersist, the EJB 3 injector that's recent, or those 303 annotations that were pushed to the ML a couple weeks ago. A guy at the office went and added a bunch of the REST functionality I've been hollering about off an on. He added it for a school project. We haven't seen the code because, uh, well, I suck for one. You know, time and distractions, and the cat's sick, etc. So, this vision of an abandoned hulk adrift at sea I think is untoward. Rather its more like that restaurant you keep going back to because they make the BBQ Short Ribs and Pancakes the way Mom used to for Tuesday Supper. Where the burgers from the grill taste great because they never clean the thing. Stripes is solid, mature, and "well seasoned". > Having said all that, keep up the effort in driving the discussion about the > new web site. I won't argue with someone who is passionate about something > and takes ownership of it. I would ask though to keep the Google group > focused on just the new web site and leave the discussion about the future of > Stripes here on the mailing list. I think the web chat should stay here. The community is small enough that it doesn't need more fragmentation. Who knows someone might show up having problems and turns out that he's a crack animator who makes an new animated Stripes logo inspired by some Anime Giant Robot that converts from a simple disposable lighter in to a fusion powered rocket cycle bristling with missiles, cannon and laser blasters. *click* *WHIRL SPIN CLANK CREAK* *powerful orchestra crescendo* *WhoooshZapBlamBangBlamityZapBAMBAM* *KABOOOM* (clearing smoke, dramatic low angle camera shot, cue WWF announcer) SSSTTTRRRIIIPPEEESSS!!!! The library that puts ACTION in to FRAMEWORKS! Maybe that's what we need. Regards, Will Hartung ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ Stripes-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ Stripes-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
