Greetings!
I have been following some of the recent discussions on this
mailing list about possible directions for the Jakarta project.
I would like to offer the following observation: To have code and
projects coming out of Jakarta being more widely adopted,
developers first need to be aware of them, then they have to be
able to judge whether a Jakarta project is suitable for the
developers' needs.
I believe that the Jakarta website could do more to make its
products easily accessible. It is often not easy to tell what a
project is actually about, what the project's scope is, how
its functionality is achieved, or how mature and usable the
existing code base is.
Evaluating an of-the-shelf component usually is an iterative
process: In a first step one tries to determine the overall
purpose of the component, and whether it is suitable for one's
purpose at all. In later steps, one may consider how the component
works, and what distinguishes it from comparable/competing
products.
The Jakarta subprojects support this evaluation and decision
process to various degrees. The one that I am most familiar with
(Velocity) is exceptional in this regard (mere coincidence?). But
some (sub-)projects force the potential user to study the Javadoc
to find out which problem the project attempts to solve, which is
probably unacceptable for many visitors.
I think it would be helpful for everyone (in particular in light
of the desire to see Jakarta code being more widely adopted in
outside projects) to try to improve the information offered here,
and to support visitors in their evaluation and decision process
as much as possible.
After this introduction...
Here is what I have done: I have scoured the entire Jakarta
website and compiled information not only on each project, but
also on each of the subprojects (such as those in the Commons,
or those that are part of Avalon or Turbine), which are not
immediately visible when visiting the Jakarta homepage.
For each project, I have included a short, one-paragraph
description (often taken from the projects webpage), but I also
tried to give a sense of the maturity and the activity of the
project. For anybody wanting to use (as opposed to develop)
Jakarta code in their own projects, this information will play a
significant part in their final decision. (I report the version
number as proxy for the maturity and the extend of the News
section of each project as proxy for its activity.)
I hope that by providing the information not only about the
top level project, but also about all the individual subprojects
in one location, a visitor to the site will have an easier
time assessing purpose and scope of each of the projects.
I would hope that this can be extended in the future to include
the following:
- a concise abstract, stating what the project is about and
what purpose it serves (the foundation for which I hope
to provide here, based on what many projects already offer on
their individual homepages)
- a description how the project works, possibly by walking the
visitor through a Hello, world example application. (Some
Jakarta projects are exemplary in this, others are not. In
particular for the larger projects, such as Avalon, Turbine,
Struts, Jetspeed it is not easy to find out how to use them
in one's own work and what benefits would be derived. Very
extensive study is needed to find out whether the project
would even be applicable.)
- a comparison with comparable projects (Velocity is exemplary
in that).
I am not deeply familiar with many of the Jakarta projects (in
particular, I can't quite fathom the full extend of some of the
frameworks, such as Avalon or Turbine, at this time), but in the
spirit of 'release-early/release-often' I would like to make the
information I have compiled so far available to the community. Any
feedback (if polite) is welcome, in particular corrections from
people more knowledgeable about a given project. I will try to
incorporate anything useful and feed it back into the community.
As time goes on, I will try to fill in other pieces as well (such
as worked examples) - any help or advice is welcome, of course!
The compilation follows below - I have tried to encode it using
the jakarta-site XML tags. My apologies if I am not using them
properly. I think it would be wonderful if the document could be
made available on the Jakarta website for review (unfortunately, I
don't maintain a personal website at the moment).
Best regards,
Ph. Janert
-
Philipp K. Janert, Ph.D. janert at ieee dot org
# Document begins below #
?xml version=1.0?
document
properties
author email=janert at ieee dot orgPhilipp K. Janert/author
titleJakarta Overview/title
/properties
meta name=keyword content=jakarta, java/
body
section name=Libraries, Tools, and APIs
