Saturday October 18, 2008

Open Source (Business) Model

Greg has written a good write up about the recent misunderstanding of the open source model (Spring, ExtJS).

Quote:

But those of us who work in open source, must not forget that freedom is the at core of our model and that we must grant those freedoms on a non-discrimanatory basis.

+1

Posted on Oct 18, 2008 at 15:36 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Sunday October 12, 2008

Spring Good News and Spring 3.0 in SVN

After a lot of feedback from the community (including myself), SpringSource decided to tune their maintenance policy. Although we are not at the original status with the maintenance releases, I am satisfied that maintenance releases will be available for each major version until the next major version is out.

Also, Rod’s clear statement about Spring’s license makes me a little bit more confident about my engagement with the Spring community:

Let me take this opportunity once again to guarantee that Spring will remain open source for the community, under the current (Apache) license. Period.

Also, it seems that at least parts of Spring 3 are available in a public repository. According to Matt it is available here: https://src.springframework.org/svn/spring-framework/trunk/. I didn’t find much code there, but Jürgen pointed out that they are behind schedule. So let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Posted on Oct 12, 2008 at 14:38 (MET) | Permalink | 3 comments

Monday October 6, 2008

2 AJAX Styles: Enriching Web Apps vs. Rich Internet Apps

When I wrote about AJAX Hysteria in 2005, shortly after Jesse James Garret coined the term, I suggested that AJAX will be a complement to classic web applications. While this is still true, I have come that AJAX will actually at least partly replace the traditional server roundtrips. There saw some evidence when I had a look at ExtJS (thanks to Zoob), but when Andreas told me about SproutCore and Cappucino I knew that AJAX was able to create full-fledged applications.

But back to the 2 styles of AJAX: The enriching web apps style is for enhancing traditional websites (therefore it is also called “progressive enhancement”). Instead of having static elements on the page, JavaScript (or call them AJAX) libraries render lists as accordions or create animated navigation menus. Nevertheless, if JavaScript is not available, these websites degrade gracefully, and will even on Lynx produce some readable output. The enrching webapp style can be implemented by libraries like JQuery, Scriptaculous, Mootools, etc. Personal sidenote: I am a big fan of JQuery.

The Rich Internet Application (RIA) style is different. The term RIA was introduced by Macromedia in 2002 in a white paper about Flex, which saw RIAs to overcome the classic request-response page rendering model (among other criteria). Apparently, this works really well also with standards-based technologies now. RIAs leverage JavaScript for CSS and DOM manipulation in the browser, and AJAX calls to the server back-end. With the latest frameworks (SproutCore and Cappuccino) it is also possible to use proper software engineering techniques like design patterns, unit testing, etc. On its website SproutCore claims to bring the feel of desktop application development to the web. The down-side of the rich internet application style is that they are following the WWW principles anymore, for example they are less accessible than enriched web applications, back-buttons are considered an issue, to work around, etc. Also this is all still very new, so these frameworks do not have extensive documentation, etc.

At the end of the day it is important to know what you need. Do you need to create a website or an application? Today I think, the two style will co-exist, let’s talk about that again in two years time. ;-)

What do you think about the these styles? Or are there more?

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 at 21:55 (MET) | Permalink | Add comment

Sunday October 5, 2008

Spring Maintenance Releases from the Community

A little bit of background: SpringSource recently announced that after the first three months after a major release they would only provide maintenance releases to paying customers. The press release was very unclear, but finally in the discussion at TSS Rod made clear what this means for non-paying customers:

  • SpringSource will create release builds within the first three months. Important: By “major release” they also mean releases like 2.5 or 3.1, which some might consider minor releases.
  • After the first three months SpringSource will commit all patches to the public Spring CVS repository, but will neither create release builds nor tag the releases (only to their paying customers).

I don’t want to judge whether SpringSource turned to the bad side by this. However, as Rod points out the real open source community would be able follow the source repository activity and compile a maintenance release themselves (Rod at TSS) when they need it for their project. But there is an issue, which Rod is is not addressing.

If every open source project will compile their own Spring releases and bundle them with their software, we are all very likely to get into BIG problems with our dependencies. If you use framework A and framework B in you project, which both rely on Spring, it is very likely they they will come with different builds of the Spring code, and now it is up to you to decide which Spring build to use in order to have running system. More so, all Maven dependency management efforts are in vain, when there is no tagged version. (BTW: This is not only an issue for non-paying Spring users, but also for the paying folks…)

So what can we do? I thought about this for a while, and I think there are not many options. Referring to daily builds from the repository will lead to proliferation and eventually to dependency hell. Some big companies may make the effort to build their own Spring releases and have some Spring mavens who are responsible for creating internal Spring releases. The third option, and IMO the best option are community builds.

The community can discuss the patches committed to the source repository and decide when to create a community release. This effort has already started: Clinton Begin registered freespring.org, which is supposed to provide tagging based on some voting system. That way, I hope we will all be able to continue to use Spring (and all the frameworks and other software, which build on it) as we do today.

Let’s support freespring.org and hope that SpringSource does care about their community and will not attempt to stop this effort!

Posted on Oct 5, 2008 at 20:22 (MET) | Permalink | 2 comments