On Aug 15, 2006, at 6:12 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
On Aug 15, 2006, at 11:15 AM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
I am more in favor of the approach taken by the companies behind
projects like Apache Geronimo (an open source spec-compliant J2EE
server) - if you are to invest money in certain technology that
you do not control, change the rules and take control!
I am not familiar with the story of Apache Geronimo, what happened?
The way the J2EE situation looked like a few years ago was this:
There was a J2EE specification lead by Sun. There were commercial
J2EE-compliant servers implementing it ("compliant" in a strict sense
of passing Sun technology compatibility kit - TCK). There was one
semi open source (or should I say pseudo open source) server JBoss -
the code is open, but the development process is closed and
controlled by a single company.
There wasn't a true open source compliant J2EE server. So some Apache
folks got together and created one. From scratch! And negotiated TCK
access with Sun (this was actually a very hard part). I don't know
all the details of who bought who in the process and who is paying
who to develop it (IBM is seriously involved now). But what's really
important is that the process remains entirely open and fair,
following Apache meritocracy rules. So there are no concerns about
dependency on a single player and general future of the project -
something that plagued WebObjects from at least the day I started
using it in 98.
How this analogy is related to WO? Just look at WOLips - some folks
got together and created a replacement for the Apple tools. That's a
very inspiring example to me.
The next logical step (maybe I am dreaming) would be to create a
clean room WO framework that is API-compatible with Apple's, reusing
whatever open source code and J2EE environment possible. (regarding
EOF - it should be fairly easy to bridge EOEditingContext with the
current Cayenne stack, so creating EOAccess is really not required).
All this is doable and the LOE is reasonable (again remember WOLips
success story). And it can be done fairly quickly if all the parties
who suggested to petition Apple or market WO are ready to sponsor a
fair open source community effort. I suspect this won't happen
though. The community is rather small, and most of the folks would
prefer to stay WO *users* (no negative meaning intended), and don't
want to take extra burden to develop the stack. On the other hand if
there are two or three mid-size companies who are ready to foot the
bill ....
Andrus
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