I think my ears are burning... On Sep 2, 2010, at 3:32 PM, Edward Smith wrote:
> While I appreciate the enthusiasm and effort, right now my concern is not > with hashing out details to a new web site for Stripes. I was disappointed, > though not surprised, to learn that Tim is no longer involved and that is a > much bigger issue. Basically we're all on a ship without a captain and thus > have no idea where we're going. Oh, au contraire mon frere. (That's French. Does Freddy know french? He's from Canada. Isn't Canada in France? Maybe there's a reason I'm not on the Google Maps team....) I am certainly not one to downplay or disparage Tim's gift to us all and his original leadership. But, to be frank (not French), TIm has been away for a LONG time, and this project has not suffered because of it. It really hasn't. The foundation he left behind was rock solid, and the others involved (notably Ben, Freddy, and Aaron) have taken and have had the wheel for a some time, and navigated S.S. Stripes quite well. > Many successful Open Source projects have a name behind it: Spring - Rod > Johnson, Grails - Graeme Rocher, JBoss - Marc Fleury, Hibernate - Gavin King, > etc. Tim is/was the name behind Stripes. Many OSS projects are the result of the passion of one person, scratching that itch. But there are a lot of successful projects that are (publicly at least) "personality free". Rather they're led by a passionate community, whether something formal with committees and meetings and afternoon teas or something more ad hoc, such as what Stripes has. We have and have had several active folks involved in this project. Some have left, others stayed, some just lurk. To be honest, Tim has had his itch scratched, and it was starting to chafe. > What I am more interested in at this point is the formulation of a vision of > where Stripes needs to go and a very high-level plan on how to get there. As > the old saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Creating a new, > updated web site is a good high-level idea but there are a lot more top-level > issues to resolve than the web site. But that's the real conflict here. It's not lack of passion, lack of vision, or even lack of commitment. I'm in the "if it ain't broke..." camp. I'm one of the old school curmudgeons. If anything I am grateful that this project, whether by design, vision, or simply lack of resources, has been mostly static. Because it does follow the "one thing well" philosophy. Doing its one thing well, and sticking to it, is one of the charms of Stripes, as others have mentioned. It enables easy uptake by new users. It enables the folks that are working on it, to make the shiny bits gleam even brighter. It allows something like Freddy's book to have traction and longevity in the space, keeping its value. Imagine poor Freddy doing all that work to have Stripes 2.0 come out 6mos later and deprecate chunks of it. He'd have to have a FAQ "Confusing and worthless parts of my book because of 2.0 (THANKS A LOT GUYS)" constantly spammed to the mailing list. It's a strange phenomenon in software that code must be popular to be useful. That code can never be finished. Stripes last release and update is less than a year ago. 8-9mos. But "woe is us, Stripes is dying". Java 6 was release FOUR YEARS AGO. Holy crap! eeeeeeeeee NURSE! PADDLES! eeeeeee CLEAR *thump* eeeeeeeee 300! STAT! CLEAR! *thump* eeeeeeeeeeeee *click* That's it, that's all I can do. Pronounce it Dr. Gosling. Java is dead. Guess I better port our stuff to Fortran or something, you know, to stay relevant. IMHO, Stripes is not on its death bed. Or, if it is on its death bed, hell, it's ALWAYS been on its deathbed. Much hullabaloo was made for Stripes when 1.5 originally came out (I know, I hulla'd some of the baloo myself). That was 2 years ago for the initial 1.5 release. You know what else was going on two years ago? The overall Java community was more vibrant. Despite JEE 6, Seam, JPA 2, GlassFish v3, Tomcat 7, Spring 3, etc. etc. etc. from a COMMUNITY POV, Java is reaaaly quiet right now. So, beyond maintaining the framework, bug fixes, etc., there hasn't been a lot needed. If anything, 1.5 better enable Stripes to be "Self sustaining". And by that I mean more of the framework was laid bare and made available for the kids at home to add stuff to it. Like Stripersist, the EJB 3 injector that's recent, or those 303 annotations that were pushed to the ML a couple weeks ago. A guy at the office went and added a bunch of the REST functionality I've been hollering about off an on. He added it for a school project. We haven't seen the code because, uh, well, I suck for one. You know, time and distractions, and the cat's sick, etc. So, this vision of an abandoned hulk adrift at sea I think is untoward. Rather its more like that restaurant you keep going back to because they make the BBQ Short Ribs and Pancakes the way Mom used to for Tuesday Supper. Where the burgers from the grill taste great because they never clean the thing. Stripes is solid, mature, and "well seasoned". > Having said all that, keep up the effort in driving the discussion about the > new web site. I won't argue with someone who is passionate about something > and takes ownership of it. I would ask though to keep the Google group > focused on just the new web site and leave the discussion about the future of > Stripes here on the mailing list. I think the web chat should stay here. The community is small enough that it doesn't need more fragmentation. Who knows someone might show up having problems and turns out that he's a crack animator who makes an new animated Stripes logo inspired by some Anime Giant Robot that converts from a simple disposable lighter in to a fusion powered rocket cycle bristling with missiles, cannon and laser blasters. *click* *WHIRL SPIN CLANK CREAK* *powerful orchestra crescendo* *WhoooshZapBlamBangBlamityZapBAMBAM* *KABOOOM* (clearing smoke, dramatic low angle camera shot, cue WWF announcer) SSSTTTRRRIIIPPEEESSS!!!! The library that puts ACTION in to FRAMEWORKS! Maybe that's what we need. Regards, Will Hartung ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
