On 12/20/05, Sam Ruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Sylvain Wallez wrote: > > Adam Peller wrote: > [snip] > > So the questions are: > > - is the ASF the place for Eclipse extensions? I don't deny the ability > > to _existing_ project to host their tooling, but this isn't the case > here. > > As I mentioned, I was involved with these discussions. The ASF doesn't > tend to make these types of decisions based on the technical aspects of > a project. What impressed me about the people who were proposing this > is that they were sincerely interested in the Apache License and > collaboration model.
Belief in the Apache collaborative development model should certainly be a prerequisite for acceptance into the Apache community (to me, that's the thing that binds ASF as a community more strongly than anything else). But that, by itself, is not a compelling argument for combining these two particular subprojects into a single proposal. That strikes me as bad software engineering, as well as bad social engineering. >From a software engineering viewpoint, focusing on a single tool as a delivery vehicle will tend to bias architectural and implementation decisions towards what is easy to express in that particular tool. It would leave aside the little detail that not everyone interested in AJAX will be using that tool, or will even be using Java. I'd like to see the various AJAX libraries, and the communities around them collaborate more ... but that problem space is plenty big enough without figuring out bindings to tool widgets, for a particular platform, at the same time. >From a social engineering viewpoint, this particular combination of subprojects would create a perception that Apache's support for AJAX is all about what you can do in Eclipse. That's too limiting a scope for what we should be trying to achieve. A better answer might be to separate the tooling aspects from the framework aspects, and consider building a community around "tools for building AJAX based applications" in general, that consumes this technology but unoubtedly others as well, rather than trying to combine oil and water in the same project. Craig
