Dion Gillard wrote:
On 3/30/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dion Gillard wrote:
Jonathan,
do you have a list of things that are technically wrong with Struts 1.x?
Dion, there is a Struts/Webwork merger afoot whereby the Webwork
codebase is being donated to ASF to be the basis of the next version of
Struts, Struts Action Framework 2 or whatever.
Yep, already know that.
I figured that likely. However, I try not to assume too much prior
knowledge in posts. I originally assumed that everybody here on this
list knew basic stuff like that and it later became apparent that a lot
of people don't.
The fact that the Webwork codebase is being used as the basis of the
next version of the framework by the Struts people rather than Struts
itself basically leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the Struts
developers themselves consider Webwork to be better technology.
Not necessarily.
Well, Shale is a separate matter AFAICS, since it is a completely
different approach paradigmatically. As regards an action framework with
roughly the same approach, the fact that the Struts people don't want to
use their own code as the basis for that does IMO lead to certain
inescapable conclusions.
There may be many reasons. And as I understand it, the
'next version of the framework by the Struts people' could also be
considered Apache Struts Shale. Quoting Ted H: "The reason Shale is not
Struts 2.x is because there was so much concern about doing things better,
that we ended up with no easy way to pour our old wine into the new bottle.
Many of us can't afford to recode the many large and mature Struts
applications now in production. There has to be a clear and simple way to
get there from here."
The attempt to relabel Webwork as Struts XXX and also Shale as Struts
XXX strikes me as extremely problematic because it would tend to create
great confusion (and maybe even anxiety) among existing Struts users as
to what they are supposed to do now.
However, that is just my opinion. I consider that I am free to express
it, of course, but it is up to Struts people to sort this stuff out.
It also seems to me that the majority of existing Struts users are quite
confused or just uninformed about all this.
It's also quite possible that it is easier to use Don's work with Struts Ti,
and combine WebWork than it is to make the same sorts of changes to Struts
1.x. Why reinvent the wheel?
Well, I don't think Webwork is really being combined with anything. It's
just the same Webwork. It's getting relabelled as Struts something or other.
Also, based on your reasoning, the Webwork developers themselves must
consider Struts a more widely adopted, better marketed technology, with far
more developer acceptance and corporate penetration.
The above is not a matter of debate AFAICS. If it weren't for this
mechanism, there would be no reason for the Webwork people to want to
become part of this community. That is fairly obvious.
As far as the exact technicalities, I can only do what you can do, which
is look in google for discussions about this. A google search on:
struts webwork comparisons
yields a lot of hits, but the first result is this one:
http://wiki.opensymphony.com/display/WW/Comparison+to+Struts
Obviously, not totally objective, since it is by the WW people, but
probably factual enough. You get various blog entries and you can ask
these people, who surely know a lot more than I do.
The truth is out there (somewhere).
Truth being subjective opinion, yes.
"Is WebWork better' technology?" is a subjective question with people on
both sides of the fence.
It appears that the Struts people are conceding that Webwork is the
better technology -- vis-a-vis Struts 1.x, I don't mean Shale, which is
almost orthogonal. (You see how confusing this gets...)
But to basically relabel the current version of Webwork as Struts Action
2 is basically to concede that Webwork is more advanced technology.
What the merger brings us as users is the ability to pick up some of the
better features of WebWork without necessarily taking the hit/cost of
'switching'.
Well, this is only the case if they provide some compatibility layer or
migration/conversion tools. All of that, for the moment (correct me,
someone, if I'm wrong) is just vaporware. I have also been surprised by
the seeming lack of migration-related threads on the struts-user list.
But, for the moment anyway, switching from using Struts 1.x to Struts
Action 2 is the same work as switching to Webwork would have been.
There's been much talk about bridging SAF1 and 2, and I expect
with such a huge install base, this will be a big deal to the Struts
developers.
Well, it remains to be seen what will happen. I have expressed general
concerns that what this represents is negative in terms of open source
ecology in general, since you have the team that failed to innovate
absorbing, and imposing their culture and project management practices
on the team that did innovate. (Like... does this really make sense???)
In a messages a few messages before in this thread, I think Al Erdani
characterized fairly well how this flamey thread came about.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
FreeMarker group blog, http://freemarker.blogspot.com/
I hope that helps.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
On 3/30/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Vinny wrote:
There have been many time in history when an individual
catholic _has_ been more catholic than the Pope.
I am simply giving my opinion.
Well, that's true, I guess. You've got a point there, Vinny.
So, yeah, feel free. Be more catholic than the pope. Keep maintaining
that Struts 1.x is great stuff after the Struts developers themselves
have abandoned it in favor of Webwork.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
On 3/29/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Vinny wrote:
I still say that struts 1.x has not "lost" to webwork.
When I do a quick unscientific search on monster.com for
"struts" I get over 1000 jobs listed. The same search for "webwork"
yields 22 jobs. Apparently struts "won" on the business front,
That's a different question entirely. The question posed up top here
in
the subject line is: "Why did Struts development stagnate?"
Actually, you could append to that question, given this above data --
"Why did Struts development stagnate -- *despite* having such a huge
user community and so on and so forth.... as documented above...."
I don't think that is even debatable.
Well, I don't either. That's why that is not the subject of the
debate.
Now if we want to talk about
technical prowess then maybe Jonathan might have a point.
It was about technical prowess. "Struts development" -- the fact that
the Struts developers have abandoned the 1.x codebase decided to base
"Struts Action 2" on the Webwork codebase.
I can't comment
on it because like a good little scientist I'd like to do some
experiments first.
Well, look, Vinny, if the Struts developers themselves prefer to base
Struts 2 on Webwork, they are saying that Webwork is technically
better.
If you want to defend Struts 1.x after that, then you're in the
position
of being more catholic than the pope.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
To me this seems like a nice merger that benefits both projects.
The betamax vs VHS , RISC vs CISC, frameworkC vs frameworkD, Bush vs
Kerry
debates are rapidly becoming background noise to me.
On 3/29/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Niall Pemberton wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Revusky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 11:27 PM
It still seems broadly on-topic to me. It's certainly a
legitimate,
well-formulated question.
Seriously, the only other possibility I see is struts-dev. If it's
off-topic on both struts-user and struts-dev, then the question
really
is (as I am starting to suppose) basically taboo.
The question isn't taboo - I posed the same kind of thing (and
offered one
perspective) in an earlier thread:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.struts.user/122903
However I don't think what I said in that thread was the whole
story
-
clearly frameworks such as WebWork succeeded and I assume they were
a
volunteer effort as well.
Yes, the bulk of your explanation there seemed to be that Struts was
an
all-volunteer effort and so on.
This could not possibly be why it fell behind Webwork.
We currently have 22 committers on Struts -
Out of curiosity, what is your rough guess as to how many of these
22
people committed any code in the last... year, let's say.
but levels of activity vary
widely and I would say that the type of talented people it takes to
drive a
project forward (and I don't include myself in that group) no
longer
have an
interest in doing so on the Action 1 side - for various reasons.
People such
as Craig put their effort into developing the JSF standard and see
that as
the future for web development and that is where they now
concentrate
their
effort. Don was doing alot of work inovating with Struts Ti
Well, I was not aware of this. However, you mean that Struts TI was
a
complete rewrite of the framework? I mean, was there a tacit
assumption
there that Struts 1.x could not be evolved forward and required a
complete rewrite?
and had the
offer to merge not come along from WebWork - we would probably be
seeing the
fruits of his efforts as Action2 and not even discussing
"stagnation"
at
this point. Ted was AWOL doing C# for a while (hes been "back" for
a
while
which is good :-), Martin seems focused on javascript etc. etc. So
I
guess
this leads to the next question "Well why didn't we attract new
talented
people into the project that would drive Struts forward?" This I
don't
know - seems that lots of people decided to go invent their own web
framework (YAWF) rather than get involved with Struts. Some of that
is
certainly their own egos being the "founder of a framework" and
some
of it I
believe is the compatibility issue - its far easier to write a
brand
new
shiny web framework when not hampered by backwards compatibility.
Whether we
as a community "put them off" I have no knowledge - but I've never
seem that
proferred anywhere as a reason. It was always something like
"Struts
sucks
because of x, y and z and my brand new shiny framework does it
better".
Course its far easier to invent a new framework by looking at
existing ones
and seeing how you can improve them. Back to the "new people"
question
though - its not my perspective that we have lots of people
knocking
at the
door trying to give us contributions and we're turning them away. I
believe
its easy to become a Struts committer - you offer reasonable code,
are
helpful in the community (e.g. answering questions on the user
list),
been
around a while and don't start flame wars or attack people
personally
- then
you get asked. Theres probably 2/3 people who probably think they
should
have been asked, but haven't - they may or may no have a point -
but
besides
them I don't see it as a case of Struts excluding people and I
don't
have an
explanation for why there are not hoards of people wanting to join.
Well, first of all, on the question of people going off and doing
their
own framework, you have to basically figure that some of these
people
just didn't think that they could apply their ideas in this setting.
If
somebody with a fire in their belly and some innovative ideas had
showed
up here and wanted to work on that, would they have been able to do
so?
After all, the fact remains that everybody knows that any work they
do
under the ASF umbrella will get much more attention and usage than
it
would otherwise. This is the main (probably the only) reason that
the
Webwork people have come here. So, a priori, your saying that you
aren't
attracting collaborators is really quite odd, isn't it?
The thing is, Niall, that pretty much all the times you get a new
collaborator, that person was first a user. Typically that someone
is
a
"power user", and is pushing the limits of what the tool can do, and
starts donating code to make the tool more powerful, and next thing
you
know, the guy is a collaborator.
Now, you've got a lot of users, so that this basic mechanism doesn't
operate is rather odd.
What I have noticed is that the communication with your user
community
is rather poor. Basically, for all of it, the bulk of your users
seem
completely clued out as to what is going on with the Webwork merger.
For example, you get people flaming me because I am saying that
Webwork
is better than Struts. They say "stop bashing Struts". But I am
saying
exactly what the Struts developers are saying! They have accepted
that
Webwork is better than Struts! So am I supposed to be more catholic
than
the pope?
Also these people assume that I must be a Webwork developer.
Somebody
wrote a spoof of me in which I was praising Webwork to the skies! I
have
nothing to do with Webwork. I have never even used it. When I say
Webwork is better, I am simply echoing what the Struts PMC are
already
saying.
So, I mean, some of this is just going on because people don't know
what's going on. I see a real communications failure.
If people really knew that the current Struts 1.x codebase is being
abandoned, you would think that there would be a lot more threads on
this list about migration issues. "I've got this Struts 1.x App and
I
just was having a look at Webwork, which is going to be Struts
Action
2
and have various questions about how my app can be migrated...." I
don't
see threads like that, which means to me that you have not
communicated
to your rank and file users what is really going on here.
Now, if there really is a problem in terms of user<->developer
communication here, it would explain why the process whereby certain
power users become collaborators is not happening as often as it
should.
And this would be a factor in the stagnation.
Certainly, given the size of the user community, even if 1 in 100
people
eventually became committers via that process, you would have a lot
of
active committers.
That a community like webwork with far fewer users nonetheless has a
more active, real developer team, is really something to look at.
Certainly, in earlier discussions, most people just seemed to think
that
it was really hard to become a commmitters. So if that is a
misconception, it is a widely held one. There's something odd going
on
here.
Another answer to the question is "it hasn't stagnated -
Stop, Niall, stop. That's not an answer. :-) Let's not go around
completely in circles.
we've moved on to
Shale" and that is the future for existing Struts users.
Well, if that is the case, you haven't communicated it to your
users.
I grant that if you are going to communicate something to your
users,
you should probably have a consistent message. The Action/Shale
cohabitation seems to almost preclude having a consistent message.
Anyway, JSF/Shale is just something completely different
paradigmatically and the idea of that as "Struts 2" is really quite
odd.
Clearly there are
quite a few people that will disagree with this - but also alot
that
will
say "great I buy JSF as the future and I'm glad the Struts project
has an
offering that supports this".
Well, unless you are offering migration tools or a compatibility
layer
or something, how does it benefit your users that Shale is under the
"Struts umbrella" any more than if it was a separate project? I
mean,
it's a paradigmatic shift that you have to get head around either
way
and existing apps would need to be refactored.
At the end of the day though this does seem academic, - since we
now
have two
offering for whatever camp you fall into (component orientated or
action
orientated) and from my point of view the really good thing about
the
WebWork merger is not only the great software were getting - but
also
the
talented new blood thats coming into the project.
Well, if you accept that the Webwork people just ran the better
project,
you guys failed to keep Struts 1.x going at least in terms of
innovation
and development, then by that logic, the current Struts PMC should
just
step down probably and let the Webwork people run the show.
If the same PMC that presided over technical stagnation before is
going
to remain the managers of the project, then I think it isn't an
academic
question. You have to examine the mistakes you made before.
So I've given my answer to the question - now can we let this list
get back
to helping and answering user questions - which is its main
purpose?
Niall, I don't know what you're talking about here. I see no sign
that
the list stopped helping people and answering their questions due to
the
presence of this thread.
You were giving some signs that you now were willing to talk about
this.
You've had a certain say about this now. You've stepped forward and
said
the topic is not taboo. Well, now you're saying, let's not talk
about
it
any more, i.e. I broke the taboo temporarily to get this guy off my
back, but nudge nudge, wink, wink, the topic really is taboo.
Okay, maybe that wasn't your intent, but if not, and the topic isn't
taboo, how do you know other people don't have opinions to express
now?
Again, the idea that this is an either-or proposition and the list
has
to choose between talking about this and helping people by answering
technical questions is actually absurd, isn't it?
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Niall
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Ghetto Java: http://www.ghettojava.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Ghetto Java: http://www.ghettojava.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
http://www.multitask.com.au/people/dion/
Chuck Norris sleeps with a night light. Not because Chuck Norris is
afraid
of the dark, but because the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
http://www.multitask.com.au/people/dion/
Chuck Norris sleeps with a night light. Not because Chuck Norris is afraid
of the dark, but because the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
