Am 02.11.2010 01:31 schrieb Mark Ramm:
IMHO, what we NEED is to keep and maintain a critical mass of committed
developers that will move the framework forward, and will help us to be
competitive in the market.
We've had lots of developers go on to create their own frameworks, or do
other things, and IMHO that's good. It shows the options, and helps us
see ourselves better, but it doesn't make TG more viable. What makes
us more viable is a core team of people who work together to improve the
framework, and are committed to the project and the team.
Right, that's a crucial point in the whole discussion. I heard people
say "I don't care if the framework is popular, it just needs to work for
me". Sounds reasonable, but I beg to differ, for various reaons. First,
it is very difficult to convince managers, coworkers or clients to use a
framework that nobody has ever heared about. Hiring people and getting
hired is also difficult. Second, a popular framework will likely not go
away so quickly. Third, and most importantly, a popular framework will
attract more users and developers who contribute in various ways, and
make it even better, not only in terms of features, but also stability
and documentation, or who blog about it and make it even more popular
(the "Matthew effect" kicks in), soon you may even have your own
conferences. I.e. once a certain popularity is reached, a
self-reinforcing loop is created. Another example for this
self-reinforment: Django is now so popular that Apatana (Pydev) comes
with special Django integration which makes it even more attractive
(http://pydev.org/manual_adv_django.html) for developers. People will
create a whole ecosystem around the framework, providing apps, plug-ins
etc. that you can reuse or build upon, again reinforcing the loop.
So a popular framework has many benefits. Of course we all know that the
most popular ("industry standard") technology is not always the best;
actually often the opposite is true. The badness and uglyness of the
technology can hurt so much that people like us may deliberately step
down and set the benefits of popularity aside, just to be able to use
the better technology. Nevertheless, becoming a popular and vivid
project and community is still highly desirable, not only for the sake
of it, but because of the additional benefits I pointed out.
So what we need is a project with a critical mass to get this kind of
chain reaction started that is able to contend with Django. That's the
thing we may be able to achieve by getting BFG, Pylons and TG under one
umbrella and joining forces.
-- Christoph
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