Hi Joe,
I'm not burnt out at this point, and I wouldn't even say bitter. I may have been initially, I am human and so react with emotion, same as anyone. A more objective review of the situation in the intervening time though has lead me to a place where I am a bit frustrated by my inability to not achieve the results I hoped for, but I'm not bitter or angry.
As you said, there did seem to be a lot of support for an idea along the lines of what I did, so it seemed like something that should have garnered more discussion and perhaps alternative proposals. That didn't happen though, and while the reasons may have been perfectly valid, it is still frustrating to an "outsider", as Jack put it :)
I am still very much interested in putting the time in, and I would be more than happy to explore alternative ways of doing what I proposed. I am open to suggestion!! To be honest, I haven't thought much about ways this might be done as an "extension" to Struts... I'm not sure I see a good way that would result in the same functionality in the same way (which I believe to be a good approach, and many would seem to agree). I am listening though! :)
However, I am not right now willing to put in time on something to demonstrate an idea or something that *might" be accepted. If we can all come to some concensus on how to proceed (that I agree with) then I would absolutely love to do the work. I am not willing to waste my time though, as I'm sure no one is.
-- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com
Joe Germuska wrote:
At 8:29 AM -0800 3/11/05, Dakota Jack wrote:
Thanks, Frank. I posted this code in response to Ted's suggestion that this is the way to go to establish a dialogue with the committers on code.
I would totally endorse Ted's suggestion. The best approach is to publicly document approaches and, where possible, provide extension code that can be exercised without rushing a change to the Struts core. This is how struts-chain was developed and verified as a reasonable approach before the core was changed. It also happens to be how validator and tiles evolved. In a much more modest fashion, this was the origin of the DigestingPlugIn, which I developed and published and which was adopted into Struts all before I was a committer.
I feel bad seeing Frank's obvious bitter feelings, and as I noted elsewhere, I'm sorry I wasn't following the thread closely enough to warn that his efforts were pushing in a direction that Struts doesn't follow. In fact, I know of no open source project which would add incompatible features to an older release, except in the case of a major version number change.
I don't think we've earned "Struts 2.0" with the other changes we have, although until we do a release, we could certainly debate calling the chain based processor Struts 2.0 and making room for Frank's changes in what would then be a live development version on the 1.x branch.
As always, remember that we're all volunteers here, and we all have to scrounge for the time we apply to Struts. Also, we have an enormous installed base, and we have to take their needs into account. If the general open source community has come to expect compatibility between minor version releases, and if we've always struck a firm stance towards providing that kind of compatibility in Struts, then we need to maintain consistency.
Frank, have you exhausted any hope of packaging your changes as something which can be added on to Struts 1.2 without requiring changes to the core classes? It may seem cumbersome, but I have a feeling that it would be possible to package your changes as extensions instead of core changes or a forked Struts distribution. Where Struts falls short in this regard, I would be interested in helping design and implement changes to both 1.2 and 1.3 to improve its extensibility.
If Frank is burned out, but there's as much interest as there seemed to be on the list, perhaps some of those people would be willing to carry the baton to the next stage.
Joe
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