All the conscientious open-source developers take one step forward (not so fast, Mr. Delagrange)
Today Sam Ruby correctly pointed out that I suck. Fortunately I reached that conclusion a couple of days ago, and I'm hoping to better myself now.
So I hereby resolve to do the following things:
- Propose some additions to the Jakarta Commons charter.
I'm still working on the points of my proposal, but it seems like we Jakarta Commons folks butt our heads repeatedly on points that are really implied by existing documentation such as the Commons versioning guidelines and the general Jakarta decision making document. I think with some simple changes to the versioning guidelines and explicit recognition in the charter, we can alleviate some of Sam's concerns, at least with regard to the Commons. Stay tuned.
- Release the Latka version of Watchdog.
In previous releases, Watchdog has used the aging "gtest" ant tags for its HTTP-based functional testing. Ryan Lubke, who may be the only other active Watchdog committer, asked me if I would be interested in converting Watchdog to a Latka implementation. I got about 90% of the way there, but then I got stuck on a detail which led me to convert Latka from a custom XML parser to a Jelly implementation. Sadly I haven't had the chance to get back to Watchdog (shame, shame).
However, before I can release Watchdog, I need to...
- Release Latka.
For the uninitiated, Latka is a tool for HTTP-based functional testing. Latka has a fairly rich XML-based API, and recently it has been converted to Jelly and integrated with Maven (or so I'm told). All in all, it's a nifty tool for testing websites and web servers.
Sadly, before I can release Latka, I need to...
- Release Jelly
As Sam will tell you, Jelly is still in alpha. It's an extremely useful API, way too cool to languish in development hell the way it has.
And finally on a completely unrelated note, I really should...
- Release DBTags...
even though I don't want to. DBTags was my first big code contribution to Jakarta, and even though it was fine at the time, essentially its functionality has been completely superceded by the sql subset of the JSTL. I can't even really bring DBTags up to snuff with the JSTL, because the most effective features of their sql tags require features of the JSP 1.2 specification. DBTags was released under JSP 1.1. However, there are apparently people who still use DBTags, so I guess I owe it to them to clean up the bugs and perform a 1.0 release. I can't say I'm jazzed about it though, particularly since I myself will derive little if any benefit from the effort. This does not play to my sense of enlightened self-interest. At least I have Glenn to keep me honest.
This all makes me sounds like a much bigger slacker than I think I really am. I've written code that made it to a released state, and I even managed a release once. And I can't take all the credit for this unreleased code; it is supposed to be a team effort after all. I think Jakarta Commons committers in particular spend too much time writing and restructuring code and not enough time actually stabilizing it for an effective, released API.
6:30:09 PM 
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