With wicket we have a sf.net project called Wicket Stuff (which was already in place before we joined Apache). This is the place where we invite anyone from our community to publish their work: components, integrations etc. This place was also created to host non-compatible code (Hibernate, and other GPL/LGPL/etc libraries).
The Wicket Stuff project is successful in that it attracted a big number of contributors, but IMO it failed to get the necessary quality due to lack of interest of the same contributors. Many of the projects are unsupported and never had a proper release, let alone some documentation. I see the Wicket Stuff project as a blessing and a curse: a great place to find components and integrations, but also a place where things are half finished, and that reflects on the original product as well. The typical behavior we see is that someone commits a first draft of a component they've created. They might even hook it up to the standard infrastructure (multimodule Maven project). Then they leave. Next someone wants to use the project, finds a bug or missing feature, commits their solution and moves on. No releases, no finished product, and that is IMO problematic in the eyes of folks that want to write production ready code: they want releases, changelogs, release notes and some evidence that someone is maintaining it. Be prepared to have to heavily invest in such a second leg if you want to use it as an attractor for 'enterprisy developers'. Martijn On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Noel Grandin <[email protected]> wrote: > > The SwingX project has a nice system where people put their own > not-ready-for-platform code into something like > > /trunk/users-dev/noelgrandin/src/MyWeirdWidget.java > > Then it becomes visible to everybody and people can comment and improve > on each other's code. > Quite a lot of stuff ended up making its way into the mainline like that. > > -- Noel > > On 2010-02-23 14:29, Todd Volkert wrote: >> That's a good point Noel. I actually created >> http://code.google.com/p/pivot-contrib/ a couple of weeks ago just to backup >> a layout container that I was working on that was too app-specific to be in >> the platform. I don't like the idea of putting stuff like that >> (app-specific add-ons) in the platform, but there's no legal reason to put >> it on Google Code either... it's almost as if we could create a separate >> hierarchy in SVN that lived off the trunk and never got released where we >> could put stuff like this. Then if newbies wanted widget X, and someone had >> built it before in this playground, we could just point the newbie there, >> and they could fork it and build it themselves. >> >> I know Niclas created "skunk" as a sibling to "trunk", but I'm not sure >> that's appropriate, as I think it was meant for experimental features that >> may be included in the trunk some day... >> >> In any case, what do others think? >> -T >> >> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 3:19 AM, Noel Grandin <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >>> Hi >>> >>> Pivot is still showing normal early stage adoption i.e. a trickle of >>> interest. These things tend to ramp in bursts, so my counsel would >>> simply be to be patient. >>> >>> I agree on the SWT issue - I don't think porting Pivot to SWT would >>> improve adoption. SWT already has JFace, Nebula and various other >>> additional widget libraries. >>> >>> On the other hand, Pivot is a great example of how good Swing could be >>> if it was allowed to evolve :-) >>> >>> I do notice that we're getting various conversations along the lines of >>> >>> Newbie: "X is very easy to do with toolkit Y" >>> Pivot-guru: "You could implement X on top of component C" >>> Newbie: "That's too hard! Can't you just add it?" >>> Pivot-guru: "Adding that feature doesn't really fit into our architecture" >>> >>> Which is reasonable, but maybe we should be implementing these features >>> in some kind of extras package until we have a good enough idea of how >>> to fit the features into the main codebase? >>> >>> -- Noel >>> >>> On 2010-02-23 00:14, Greg Brown wrote: >>> >>>> Though we have only gotten two responses on the SWT question, it seems as >>>> >>> though an SWT port may not be the best way to move Pivot forward. Michael >>> made some great suggestions. What do others think? What can we do to help >>> raise awareness of and interest in Pivot as a viable alternative to other >>> Java-based UI technologies? >>> >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >> > > -- Become a Wicket expert, learn from the best: http://wicketinaction.com Apache Wicket 1.4 increases type safety for web applications Get it now: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/wicket/1.4.4
