I've been quiet on this thread until now, but perhaps it's time to chime in.
First off, I have great respect for Craig and his opinions, and I think that it's obvious that Jack also has that respect. Secondly, I have greatly appreciated this discussion taking place on the user list rather than the developer list which I do not subscribe to. I have considered subscribing to the developer list before, but have previously declined because I believed it to be more oriented towards the discussion of the guts of Struts with periodic discussion of direction. While the user list is more for the how to use Struts and periodic discussion of direction (occasional VeggieTale outbreaks on Friday afternoons excepted! :-). To my mind, this thread seems like one of the direction outbreaks and I for one am glad to see this being discussed on the user list. The argument that the user list is high volume is true, but I think that "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen", might apply here. I still remember the "good ol' days" of the user list (three years plus ago) when volume was lower, but so was the helpfulness. If you wanted help, then you either begged for it or you gave up on getting any, dived in and figured stuff out for yourself. That's what I did. It doesn't hurt folks to listen to a little directional traffic now and then. (Of course, walking to school uphill both ways for ten miles through the snow with no shoes or coat is another matter. That left a mark on me! ;-) Thirdly, I appreciate Craig's perspective that for Struts to live, Struts must be willing to change. Where I side more with Jack than Craig is the level of change necessary. A certain amount of change came with the move from 1.0.x to 1.1.x and it was all good. The 1.1.x changes were the clarifications and housecleaning that are necessary as a project matures. All projects have a little cruft that gets picked up on the way from 0.0 to 1.0, the cleanup of this cruft from 1.0 to 1.1 is a well known phenomenon and therefore understandable and desirable. Where I'm still undecided is with the magnitude of change that is necessary with the approach to version 2.0. This is why I am glad to have access to these discussions on the user list. I understand that the Tomcat project made some big changes moving from 3 to 4 and again from 4 to 5, but then again, the Ant project originally thought about the same issues as they planned their roadmap to version 2 and they changed their mind. This tells me something important. To my mind, internals can change massively between versions, but the end user experience needs to change incrementally with as much back-compatibility as possible. Ant is now so well accepted, that the project team decided that it would be project suicide to make the 2.0 version break all existing scripts. I would suggest that Struts is now at a similar level of "market penetration" and should also carefully consider what follows behind as well as what lies ahead. The end user for Struts is the application developer and it is this person that benefits from an assurance of continuity. When Tomcat changed, the configuration details changed, but the writers of the servlets and JSPs were fairly unaffected, outside of having new capabilities to try out. I suggest that Struts needs that same level of continuity. If Struts needs that big a change to handle new stuff, perhaps it might be better to create a new project and start Struts on a nice end of life maintenance schedule. If Shale is the bees knees, then just start going full speed on it as a separate project and leave Struts to those of us who are happy to trundle along with it for now. Many companies, especially my very risk adverse employer, do not care to upgrade their software any faster than necessary. So when I go to my architecture group and ask if I can upgrade ShinySoftwarePackage 1.0 to ShinySoftwarePackage 2.0 their first answer is often "no", followed by "which part of 'no' would you like us to explain?" From the sounds of Ted's explanation a few days ago, the Military fit this category and they have now started using Struts, so I'm sure that they would not appreciate being told that Struts in the form that they use it now has been declared obsolete and that they'll need to upgrade. I'm not trying to whine here, but there are pragmatic aspects of all this to consider. I think that's where Jack was coming from as well. Just my 1/50th of a U.S. Federal Reserve note. :-) Simon ----------------------------------------------------------------- Simon P. Chappell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Programming Specialist www.landsend.com Lands' End, Inc. (608) 935-4526 "Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well-informed just to be undecided about them." - Laurence J. Peter >-----Original Message----- >From: Dakota Jack [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 2:36 PM >To: Struts Users Mailing List >Subject: Re: JerichoFaces ? > > >Okay, I will move my part of this discussion to the developers list. >I don't agree, however. I think that the user list is role oriented >(for user concerns which would include issues on using Struts but not >be exclusive to using Stuts, e.g. would include anything important to >users) and not merely action oriented (about using struts merely). >Pax vobiscum! > >Jack > > >On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:23:07 -0600, Joe Germuska ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> I would agree with Craig, though, that these are struts-dev >> discussions. This list is for "how do I use Struts?" There are >> enough people on the struts-dev list who will have experience and >> opinions enough to contribute to the discussion, and anyone on this >> list is welcome to join that one if they don't want to miss anything. >> >> >> >> Joe >> >> -- >> Joe Germuska >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> http://blog.germuska.com >> "Narrow minds are weapons made for mass destruction" -The Ex >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> > >--------------------------------------------------------------------- >To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
