Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
<snip/>
Start a whiteboard prototype if you feel like it, but to me it seem
quite risky to try to rewrite everything from scratch, although I
have felt the urge myself countless time while struggling with the
messy internals. But before you go ahead and rewrite everything from
scratch, take some minutes and read why Joel Spolesky thinks that
rewriting software from scratch is the:
*single worst strategic mistake* that any software company can make
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html.
Although I most often find Joel Spolsky's writings very enlightning, I
always disagreed with that one. And to understand why, consider what
is your main browser and what mail software you used to write this.
The headers say "User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)".
Sure, I'm an early adaptor, otherwise I wouldn't be here. Still, no one
talks about Netscape anymore, so for them it doesn't seem like such a
wise decision. I'm not attracted of betting a 2.2 with a lot of usefull
features and that we can deliver within a few months, if we focus,
against a leap of faith.
<snip/>
Leaving our core offering and rewriting everything from scratch means
community and product suicide, don't do it.
To last for a long time, a company/community has to make sure it has
some customers/users.
We have customers as they need what we deliver now. Alienating them by
first not improving what they use for a couple of years and then,
possibly, deliver something entierly different seem like rather strange
customer relationship management.
As a community we are gathered around what Cocoon happen to be and
(maybe unfortunately) around our interest in the next trend. What says
that we would have a common interest in something that is a revolution
rather than an evolution?
I for one wouldn't.
The new features in 2.2, if you look at them are more about managing
complexity than bringing real new stuff.
You know Sylvain, managing complexity is one of the hardest and most
complicated problems there are. And failing, to different degrees, to
manage complexity in software projects costs the companies and
organizations of the world unbelieveable amounts of money.
And with what we are about to finish if people just can stop distracting
themself and instead focus for a short while, will bring new levels of
complexity management to webapps. It is worth increadibly much more than
just adding some new half baked buzzword compability.
Is it something that will bring lots of new users? I don't think so.
So although we have to maintain the current code base, we also have to
think about what should be our next offering.
Our next offering is Cocoon 2.2 and we at least had a common plan for
what it should contain, I will continue to follow that plan and I hope
others will. For the offering after that, sure we discuss that as well,
actually that seem to be our main occupation.
We need to finish things also.
And I completely fail to see why the stuff that you propose would need a
completely new code base. AFAICS, and as I have discussed and thought
extensively about, and in some cases partly implemented some of the
stuff, I'm pretty sure that I know what I'm talking about.
Exactly what hinder you or anyone else to add the new ideas incrementally?
/Daniel
