Hi all, I have been thinking about this topic for quite some time now and, admittedly, have been "avoiding" it.. but now that the discussion has been sparked, I can't hide my head in the sand anymore.
I am happy to see the responses to Nikolaos's post. Some very good points are made. Most of these concerns are known to the community, but the problems remain: * the web site is dry and lacks visual appeal. this has been discussed time and again and we can't find anyone with the artistic talent, the time, and the will to redesign the site. * development is not as active as it used to be. i think the framework has somewhat peaked because it is, for the most part, feature-complete. * my own involvement in the framework has been reduced to answering questions on the mailing list. don't get me wrong--i am not claiming that i was ever one of the main developers. clearly, Tim and Ben are. But, when I was working on the book, I was also developing professionally with Stripes, and the two combined made me very interested in Stripes' features. A few of the tweaks that made it into the 1.5 release were directly related to writing the book. * more on the previous point: I still develop professionally with Stripes, but have not much interest in any major new features. The current trunk suits me fine. Any "nice-to-haves" I consider not part of the core framework, and I put them in Rayures. * I fully agree with the full-stack idea. This is what Rayures does. In one minute, you can set up a Stripes project that is ready to run with Maven, Tomcat plugin, Spring, Hibernate, JPA, Log4J, and TestNG. * about the lack of developer activity: I think we need some new blood. I can't speak for Ben, but I think it is too much to ask of him being almost the sole developer. Personally, I gave my all to write the book, improve the documentation, contribute to the framework when I could, write articles (e.g. The Server Side), write blog posts, post links on DZone, get book reviews, promote Stripes on forums.. But now I am *burnt out*. As I mentioned earlier, I still answer questions on the mailing list when I can, but other than that, I need to just be a happy Stripes *user*. * more on the previous point: I think there are several people who are quite skillful, sharp, and competent who would make great developers for Stripes. I think we need a group of those people to step up and keep the framework alive. Several names come to mind, but I won't name them because I don't want to offend anyone by omission, nor do I want to put anyone on the spot. * yes I know it is lame when someone says "I'd like feature X" and the reply is "ok then why don't you implement it?" but sometimes the person actually says "I did implement it! can you add my code?" But the problem remains that someone needs to validate the code, decide if it belongs in the core (lest we bloat the framework, something we've been trying to avoid and shoud continue to resist), and so on. This is the job of a "core" group of developers who have the Stripes philosophy at heart. Unfortunately, since the departure of Tim, this core seems to have disintegrated. No disrespect at all to Tim by the way, he created a truly awesome framework and gave me an awesome topic to write about. I certainly don't blame him for having moved on. Before this post gets too long (too late!) I guess in conclusion, we all agree that Stripes needs more steam in terms of development, marketing, spreading the good word, blogging, revamping the site, developing bells and whistles--extensions that make you go "wow" but keeping them outside the core. Stripes needs more activity. The question is, who is willing to invest themselves into this goal? Who is willing to take over, for the future of Stripes? If there is enough response, how do we "hand over the reigns"? Cheers, Freddy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ Stripes-users mailing list Stripes-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/stripes-users
