Hi Volker and Kenneth
Volker, I guess I'm sad that you feel this way... The point of inviting
you to join the development team is that actually it appears that YOU
are the lead developer at present? I personally see AS as being largely
in maintenance mode, it's basically feature complete and new features
should largely become plugins. I think it merits plenty of development
for those with needs though, in particular enhancing the basic template
to support more types of plugins perhaps. However, largely speaking I
think it's looking for folks to simply maintain the status quo?
I would urge you to reconsider and join the core team? For at least the
time being that seems to mean little difference than which repo you
commit to..?
I think the state of AS is not quite as sad as you say. I think the
decline of AS input has largely been:
1) Largely dead promotional website
2) Lack of general chatter about releases in the Rails blogs, which
itself generates substantial interest
3) Mailing list became closed to defeat spammers, however, I have
noticed a massive decline in postings from users since then? Perhaps
consider other ways to defeat spam?
4) Difficulty in maintenance of the core project resources, ie no one
seems to have control over the mailing lists, commit access, etc?
I would expect that if we can fix the infrastructure (we can fork to a
new name if necessary). Arrange for "releases" to be made periodically
which include some buzz about them to create interest in the rails
community. Attract 2-4 core committers who can run development and
feeding bug fixes. Then with this I think the project is back on the rails?
With regards to Kenneth's thoughts:
Basically all of the inner guys of active scaffold should be
re-written and if you have to do that then why not just start from
scratch. Every time something in rails changed that broke active
scaffold, active scaffold was hacked to work with rails instead of
being fixed the right way(or at least that's what it seemed like to me
the 2 years I was working with it).
I would disagree with this. I only get time to hack on AS
intermittently, but breakages have been reasonably rare actually and
largely concern features that AS was creating that didn't natively exist
in Rails. In particular there is a view "overlay" feature which creates
a search path for a view and allows something higher up the path to
override things lower down the path. This wasn't a core rails feature
and several releases broke what was then a monkey patch on the core (not
unreasonable way to achieve a very useful feature). This should now be
resolved with new features that have come in I think rails2.3? Other
breakages have been all the normal changes that would need to be made to
any project on a rails upgrade, eg feature deprecation, function
renaming, etc. I recall the changes to 2.3 were something like changing
".RAILS_ENV" to ".rails_env" to avoid deprecation warnings and
similar..? (sorry, working from memory)
The core of AS looks scary initially, but it's actually fairly
straightforward. Largely it uses some dynamic magic to figure out the
list of columns in a given view, then iterates over those columns
generating some html for each column. At each stage it breaks out the
creation of each item into a fairly granular process that allows easy
over-riding of the created HTML. There is additionally some magic to
help support routes for nested stuff, but basically that's your whole
algorithm above...
I don't see a great re-write needed, although I would personally like to
shuffle some of the internals around for performance reasons such that
we generate many of the column lists once at boot time rather than per
view. However, that's a nice to have
Personally I think AS could have a very bright future, but it does need
interested developers to progress. I am available from time to time,
but I have many roles and I only have time to work on Rails things in
spurts (like many folks). I would dearly love to see Volker join and
add some grunt for as long as he is able, and it would be a shame if
this email thread puts him off continuing working on AS now...
Please folks, consider giving a bit of time and I think we can push
things forward here.
Regards
Ed W
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