----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Revusky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 11:27 PM
> It still seems broadly on-topic to me. It's certainly a legitimate, > well-formulated question. > > Seriously, the only other possibility I see is struts-dev. If it's > off-topic on both struts-user and struts-dev, then the question really > is (as I am starting to suppose) basically taboo. The question isn't taboo - I posed the same kind of thing (and offered one perspective) in an earlier thread: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.struts.user/122903 However I don't think what I said in that thread was the whole story - clearly frameworks such as WebWork succeeded and I assume they were a volunteer effort as well. We currently have 22 committers on Struts - but levels of activity vary widely and I would say that the type of talented people it takes to drive a project forward (and I don't include myself in that group) no longer have an interest in doing so on the Action 1 side - for various reasons. People such as Craig put their effort into developing the JSF standard and see that as the future for web development and that is where they now concentrate their effort. Don was doing alot of work inovating with Struts Ti and had the offer to merge not come along from WebWork - we would probably be seeing the fruits of his efforts as Action2 and not even discussing "stagnation" at this point. Ted was AWOL doing C# for a while (hes been "back" for a while which is good :-), Martin seems focused on javascript etc. etc. So I guess this leads to the next question "Well why didn't we attract new talented people into the project that would drive Struts forward?" This I don't know - seems that lots of people decided to go invent their own web framework (YAWF) rather than get involved with Struts. Some of that is certainly their own egos being the "founder of a framework" and some of it I believe is the compatibility issue - its far easier to write a brand new shiny web framework when not hampered by backwards compatibility. Whether we as a community "put them off" I have no knowledge - but I've never seem that proferred anywhere as a reason. It was always something like "Struts sucks because of x, y and z and my brand new shiny framework does it better". Course its far easier to invent a new framework by looking at existing ones and seeing how you can improve them. Back to the "new people" question though - its not my perspective that we have lots of people knocking at the door trying to give us contributions and we're turning them away. I believe its easy to become a Struts committer - you offer reasonable code, are helpful in the community (e.g. answering questions on the user list), been around a while and don't start flame wars or attack people personally - then you get asked. Theres probably 2/3 people who probably think they should have been asked, but haven't - they may or may no have a point - but besides them I don't see it as a case of Struts excluding people and I don't have an explanation for why there are not hoards of people wanting to join. Another answer to the question is "it hasn't stagnated - we've moved on to Shale" and that is the future for existing Struts users. Clearly there are quite a few people that will disagree with this - but also alot that will say "great I buy JSF as the future and I'm glad the Struts project has an offering that supports this". At the end of the day though this does seem academic - since we now have two offering for whatever camp you fall into (component orientated or action orientated) and from my point of view the really good thing about the WebWork merger is not only the great software were getting - but also the talented new blood thats coming into the project. So I've given my answer to the question - now can we let this list get back to helping and answering user questions - which is its main purpose? Niall --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
