Hi Thomas,
Yes, I understand your concerns about contributed code. The main
reason I didn't post on the wiki was that it's more comfortable for
me to keep the project on the same site with other open source
projects that we do. That allows me to easily set up Jira issue
database, mailing lists etc. (though I haven't done this for MagTags
yet, because I wasn't sure if there would be enough interest to
bother with all that). I'd also be concerned putting the jars and
source code up on the wiki because it would be really hard to manage
if people started contributing their own code to MagTags. MagTags
started out primarily as tags i needed to write for a site I was
doing, and I'm assuming that it's mostly going to be me driving the
code for it (I haven't had any offers from anyone else to be
involved). That's also the reason I didn't use Maven - if there was
interest in other people in contributing to the project I might
change the build system over to using Maven, but at the moment it's
just me working on it and it's just a lot easier for me to use
netbeans. I'd be really happy if someone wanted to make a Maven
project for it though.
I think the answer to the "contribution jungle" probably lies with
having a nice clean module (plugin) system. To install MagTags you
need to put a jar in the lib folder, add a taglib descriptor and make
a change to the web.xml file to add a servlet to the context, as well
as optionally adding a css file to your docroot. It's a bit messy and
ideally you should be able to add a module just by dropping a single
jar in a "modules" folder I think. Modules should ideally be entirely
separate from magnolia itself - so the problems of the "contributions
jungle" are not so bad, because they are separate projects - there's
no such problem with Photoshop plugins for instance. I haven't looked
at the module class yet, but I have installed the Groovy module and
had a few problems with it which I guessed are to do with the new
module system (I installed a new version of Magnolia, with the Groovy
module, but the module doesn't seem to work now - i think probably
because it thinks it has been installed but hasn't really). It seems
that the "installation" of the module involves copying the module
files to various places within the magnolia install - is there any
way around this ? It makes uninstalling very tricky. I can understand
that it must be difficult interacting with the app server to add
things to the classpath etc. without moving them into specific places
in the file system, but it must be possible surely ?
Another problem which I think is holding up people from developing
modules is that Magnolia doesn't really have a proper API to write
to. In order to compile modules you basically have to link against
the magnolia jars - separating magnolia into a "magnolia-api.jar" and
a "magnolia-impl.jar" would make it a lot easier to work with.
thanks for the interest in the project anyway. I have quite a few
improvements that make the whole library a lot better which Ill try
to do sometime, maybe in the next couple of weeks.
josh
On 9 May 2006, at 17:48, Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen wrote:
Hi Joshua,
Those tags look very interesting! Unfortunately I haven't had time to
check them out, but I am considering contributing some tags myself. I
am somewhat concerned about that if we all contribute modules and tags
by ourselves we'll get something of a "contributed jungle".
We should perhaps discuss some standardized way to contribute modules
to the Magnolia, most likely by having a dedicated wiki-page for such
modules (there is actually a section devoted to this on
http://www.magnolia.info/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Magnolia2.1 ). Have you
tried out the new Magnolia Module class yet?
I noticed that your project you use Netbeans for project control
(which again uses ant, I guess). The Magnolia project generally uses
maven for building. Would be cool if we could find a common maven goal
to use for building modules (I currently use Ant myself for this).
Well, will write more about this later. Just so you know somebody are
interested :)
And I'm sure the developers would appreciate such tags being adopted
into the Magnolia project. I remember the Jackrabbit project had a
"contrib" folder for projects like this. Maybe a structure we could
try out?
On 5/4/06, joshua portway <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I've posted a collection of handy tags that I made for a
recent
project.
...
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