Hi, On Jan 6, 12:49 pm, James Hargreaves <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > I note that the prototype libraries (available on prototypejs.org) > have not been updated since November 2010. Indeed, nothing much seems > to have been updated on the site since around then. > > Is prototype still an active project? > > Thanks > Jay
(Caveat: I'm not a member of the Prototype team and don't speak for them. My view of the project is from the outside, and so may be flawed. I was a bit involved with the project briefly, doing a fair bit of missing documentation with an eye toward contributing on the code front as well, but stepped away from it for various reasons a couple of years ago.) > Is prototype still an active project? It depends on your perspective. Unlike some other libraries, Prototype has no corporate sponsor; no one is paid to work on it. There's been no visible activity on the project since November 2010 (the last release, and last blog entry). The previous version was 14 months earlier (September 2009). There are 105 outstanding bug reports, including some that are quite straightforward to fix (such as Prototype overwriting any native implementation of `Array#filter` and such; issue #317). Most of the people who contributed to the project in the past are not currently doing so; as far as I'm aware, only Andrew Dupont (the project lead) is even nominally on the Prototype team at this point, and he's busy with other things. Here's what Andrew had to say the last time this came up, about three months ago: http://groups.google.com/group/prototype-scriptaculous/browse_thread/thread/7d434e109c23c306/547c3ed0303b4c78#547c3ed0303b4c78 My take-away here is that the project is essentially inactive -- after all, Andrew can't be expected to do all the work himself! He has a job and a mortgage and a life like the rest of us. But it could be reactivated quite quickly, really, if someone with some significant time available, and the necessary credentials to make Andrew think it made sense, stepped up and offered to take the reins alongside him. Ideally, someone or ones working for a company or companies with a significant Prototype investment that want to see the library continue and are happy to pay their engineers to work on it a bit rather than paying them to replace it with something else -- e.g., companies "giving back" to the project with actual paid developer time. It wouldn't take much. The project needs one person with a reasonable time commitment per week (say, 4-8 hours/week) to co-chair with Andrew, and then if (say) five of the companies that use Prototype could offer two hours of a developer's time per week triaging bug reports, fixing bugs, etc., that would make a _massive_ difference to the project. Hopefully that new co-chair could also look at some of the longer-term stuff (like using element wrappers rather than DOM element augmentation, which I know was high on Andrew's to do list). Best, -- T.J. Crowder Independent Software Engineer tj / crowder software / com www / crowder software / com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prototype & script.aculo.us" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/prototype-scriptaculous?hl=en.
