[Wicket-develop] Reassessing wicket stuff

[Martijn Dashorst]

All,

There has been a lot of mixed feelings concerning the current state of Wicket Stuff. As Wicket 1.1 is getting ready to steam roll out of our door, we should be starting to address these concerns.

I try to list these concerns as voiced on the various lists:

- too many data(base) oriented packages without structure, documentation and a definite vision
- too many sandbox projects that didn't finish/made a release
- too little documentation on all projects, no updates made to existing
- unclear who is responsible for which project
- different views on why Wicket Stuff was created
- different views on the lifecycle of the projects created on Wicket Stuff

The projects that have made it to a release are:

contrib-data                1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-data-hibernate-2.1  1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-data-hibernate-3.0  1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-dojo                0.1     September 21, 2005
contrib-fvalidate           1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-groovy              1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-spring              1.0     April 5, 2005
contrib-velocity            1.0     April 5, 2005
wicket-kickstart            1.0.1   July 17, 2005

The Wicket kickstart project will be moved into the core project, so we can forget about that one.

The contrib-data-* projects don't have a presence on the website, so in my opinion, they haven't been released properly (yet).

Dojo, fvalidate, groovy, spring and velocity *do* have a web presence, and in some cases the presence may be too small, but at least people can find the projects.

If we look at the number of projects in the wicket-stuff CVS root folder, we see a staggering number of efforts:

CVSROOT/                 
src/
wicket-contrib-ajax-sandbox/
wicket-contrib-beanedit/
wicket-contrib-benchmark/
wicket-contrib-data/
wicket-contrib-data-hibernate-2.1/
wicket-contrib-data-hibernate-3.0/
wicket-contrib-database/
wicket-contrib-dataview/
wicket-contrib-dataview-examples/
wicket-contrib-dojo/
wicket-contrib-easywizard/
wicket-contrib-easywizard-examples/   
wicket-contrib-examples/
wicket-contrib-examples-hibernate3/   
wicket-contrib-freemarker/
wicket-contrib-fvalidate/
wicket-contrib-gmap/
wicket-contrib-gmap-examples/
wicket-contrib-groovy/
wicket-contrib-jasperreports/
wicket-contrib-navmenu/   
wicket-contrib-palette/   
wicket-contrib-palette-examples/
wicket-contrib-scriptaculous/
wicket-contrib-scriptaculous-examples/
wicket-contrib-spring/
wicket-contrib-spring-examples/   
wicket-contrib-tinymce/   
wicket-contrib-tinymce-examples/
wicket-contrib-velocity/
wicket-easywizard/
wicket-library/   
wicket-phonebook/
wicket-stuff/
xdocs/

I would like to propose that subgroups will be formed for administering each project, and that those developers take responsibility for maintainance, support, and releasing the project. For each release I suggest we keep a minimum standard to which each project should adhere. What those standards are, I don't know yet, but I would like the  community to come with suggestions requirements, etc for us developers to act on.

What do you constitute a minimum requirement for a (sub)project to be useful, noticable, and ready for a release? How do you percieve Wicket Stuff, and how would you like to percieve Wicket Stuff in the future? Do you have suggestions for the website?

Martijn Dashorst