I think its reasonable consider creating some area on NHForge that helps
increase awareness of commercial offerings in the "NH space" so long as a
few things are made very clear:
a) they are commercial offerings (logos/links not co-mingled with those of
companies that *support* NH directly)
commercial offerings also support NH, and so much so, that I think
without a pool of commercial tools, NH is going to be a marginal toolkit in
the next few years. Mind you, NH is competing against a growing elephant in
the room, called EF. Whatever one might thing of the quality of EF and what
MS puts on the table in case of tooling, .NET developers all over the world
are exposed to EF in a lot of material provided by MS, be it articles,
magazines, books, tools or frameworks.
Currently the group of mature, supported ('alive') .NET o/r mappers
is very small. Only one of them is open source: NHibernate. The rest is
either commercial or from MS. My prediction is that within the years to
come, what MS offers will become more and more mainstream for developers who
want to use an O/R mapper. Without mature, supported ('alive') solid
tooling, any other framework out there will keel over and lead a small life,
if not die completely.
As the lead developer of a commercial tool for O/R mapping, I can
assure you, free software needs a hell of a lot of 'hands' to get a mature
tool on the table, as it takes a tremendous amount of time to create proper
tooling for these kind of frameworks. I'm sure the energy and will is alive
and kicking in the NH community, the point is: is a large group of
developers willing to spend considerable time on this, for _years_? I think
that's unlikely. See for example the amount of time and effort already spend
on the linq provider, which is still not ready: these kind of tools and
frameworks take so much time to build, if people aren't investing a lot of
time (and thus money!) into these tools/frameworks, they'll either never be
shipped, shipped in an immature state or way too late.
In the beginning of .NET, one could get away with a tool in 'shoddy'
state and not proper support. Today, things are professionalized now. A team
doesn't want to lose time on crappy tools, shitty support or both, they'll
move to the stuff which does work and which comes with full support. That's
also why I think professional tooling for NHibernate is essential for it to
make it survive in the next few years.
b) *none* of these commercial offerings are in any way 'endorsed' by NH
With this you mean, NH should promote free, open source tools
instead of commercial ones? Or: it should keep everything at the same level?
c) its made clear to everyone what the 'process' is for any other / future
commercial entities to submit their own logos, etc. to this new area for
inclusion in the list (so that no vendor feels 'excluded'
from this area)
There needs to be a balance here IMO between wanting to make potential NH
adopters aware of the available commercial offerings that can help make
their NH 'experience' better, smoother, (whatever!) and not having NHForge
become a marketing site for commercial NH tooling/add- ons.
offering logo's, links is marketing. So if you create a 'tooling'
page, you have to be aware the page is a marketing page: for tools it's
great to be linked on the website most of the potential customers will go to
eventually.
It works both ways though: for NHibernate it's good to show that
mature tools support the framework. Fabio enlisted some tools for mapping
yesterday (11 or so). Most of them are actually already what I consider
'dead'. (dead==you won't invest time/effort in learning / using that tool
for a multi-year, multi-dev project, as it's not actively maintained nor
used very much). So it will take some work to keep the list up to date.
It also boils down to who decides what though: in what direction
will NHibernate and the tooling eco-system move towards? This too is
important for people to invest time in. MS is re-creating a lot of what
NHibernate and other O/R mapper frameworks like our own already offer, in a
lot of cases with flaws all over the place, but that's not relevant now.
What's relevant is that the story towards developers and teams should be a
'one stop' place to get what you want, from framework, tools to add-ons and
add-on frameworks, without having to search through a lot of (sometimes)
out-dated wiki's, blogposts or sourceforge project pages.
If there was a totally separate 'area' (page, tab, whatever) that merely
listed such things (probably in alphabetical order or something that
didn't
imply any kind of "ranking") and provided for a logo, title, and summary
description of the tool (along with a link to the vendor's product page) I
would have no issue with this. Its when it inadvertently makes it appear
as
if the NH project 'endorses' one or more commercial products or the
commercial vendors are co-mingled with commercial entities that have
provided support, tools, etc. directly to the project that I think we
cross
a line that's a bad idea.
Generally speaking: a company never invests something without
expecting some return (charities aside ;)). A company which is willing to
spend time (and thus money) on helping NHibernate forward, will expect
something in return. If you are not willing to accept that, don't accept the
help. Sure things are ran by volunteers, but that's not an excuse anymore:
the rest isn't ran by volunteers and can spend all their time all day long
on the same things. To keep up with that, you sometimes have to make deals.
Linux is largely developed by commercial developers nowadays, employed all
by companies who rely heavily on linux. I.o.w. it's commercialized to the
last bit in every corner and I fear NHibernate to some extend will move
towards such a system as well, where developers working on it or on the
tooling, are employed to do that, either for 3rd party tools or directly on
the framework.
This will IMHO eventually lead to a more mature ecosystem where
things will sometimes look a bit commercialized. This is inevitable. Like I
said: having a list of tools on a page is marketing, telling people to use
tool x or y IS marketing. Spending time on development of NHibernate or
parts of it full time, payed by the employer, IS marketing: the
employer/company expects to get something in return, be it support hours
payed by NHibernate users, exposure of the company as a team of seasoned
developers etc. I don't see why that's a bad thing, after all, NHibernate,
the eco system arounds it and the users of it benefit.
FB
Just my two cents here.
-Steve B.
On Jul 16, 8:59 pm, Gareth<[email protected]> wrote:
Shouldn't our focus (all of us) be to grow and promote the entire
NHibernate ecosystem? A stronger ecosystem benefits everyone. When
managers and decision makers need to evaluate whether NHibernate is
well supported and growing - what better way than to show that the
core-development, community, tooling and commercial support are
flourishing.
Where can the entire NHibernate universe be promoted well? I would
have thought that NHForge would be perfect - that's why we were all
asked a while back to add links to NHForge on our websites, which we
did (http://www.slyce.com/Links/). It would be good to have all the
links to tools (open-source and commercial) in one place. People have
different needs - some only like open-source and won't touch
commercial, others want what commercial tools offer. At the moment new
users need to google for these things.
Let's make it easier for people to adopt NHibernate.
Gareth Hayter.
Slyce Software
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