On Sunday, January 6, 2002, at 08:48 PM, Martin Cooper wrote: > If we had known of the existence of Intake before today, we might have > gone > down that path. However, as Intake is apparently currently buried in the > depths of Turbine, how would we have known? Certainly the Turbine folks > haven't mentioned it up until today in any of the validator discussions > on > this list, and surely you can't be the only Turbine developer on this > list.
I'll bite. :) The first problem here is that no one mentioned the Intake framework most likely because it's already a fully functional validating framework. It's not an excuse, just a fact. My pages are already validating, so why would I get in on a discussion concerning how to write a validator? :) It's the old limited bandwidth thing again. With that out of the way, I have no problem with someone merging the two now that yours has been brought forward, but I think the question is of who (if anyone) the onus should be on to do so. I'd like to think that if Commons functions the way its supposed to then your validator will eventually grow to be so much better than Intake that we'll have no choice but to move over based upon the advantages offered to us by it. :) Another problem here is that it's not entirely clear what most of the stuff under the Jakarta banner does. Try this simple experiment: walk up to a developer that's not familiar with Jakarta and ask him/her what they think each of the following pieces of software does: Turbine, Fulcrum, Torque, Etc. (I'm picking on the projects that I work on, but clearly almost every project in Jakarta falls under this heading.) If, on the other hand, projects were named with respect to their function, then much of this problem would be alleviated. It's too late for functional naming now, of course, but perhaps each project that gets accepted from now on needs have to have an explicit declaration of what it does attached to its name. (e.g. "POI - The Jakarta Office File Format Reader/Writer") This problem is even worse in the Commons and in the Commons-Sandbox. I think that it may be a good idea to require a declaration of purpose in a standard file in the top level directory of the project for things that are placed in the Commons-Sandbox from here forward. Hopefully these can all be pasted together in some way using Anakia/XSL/Your Favorite Tool so that there is an easy way to figure out what everything there is supposed to do, much like the new front page for Jakarta. We keep saying that we don't want commons to become SourceForge 2, but currently there is nothing to prevent someone from dumping any old code there in hopes of it finding a home. Digging through the mess that it is quickly becoming is only going to get harder in the future unless we establish some standards for it now. Finally, I hope that we never grow so large that we forget that the core of Jakarta, as I see it, is the people involved. This clearly wouldn't be as much fun if everyone didn't either love/hate Jon, the Tomcat teams didn't flame each back and forth occasionally, and everyone didn't have Sam's Gump reminders being flung at us. ;) This is clearly as much about working and forming a community with some of the smartest people around as it is about writing great software. -Kurt -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
