How do you spell Community?

Essay

Some projects use the word community to be synonmyous with “stakeholders“. For example, Spring addresses its product announcements to “The Spring Community”. Evidentally, the committers are not the community, since they would not need to address these announcements to themselves! From this perspective, the “community” is somebody else.

Other projects use the word community differently. At the ASF, we sometimes talk of a project “losing its community”. When we say that, we do not mean the software isn’t being used. We do not mean that the software has no stakeholders. We mean that there is no one that is actively contributing to the software. No one is applying patches. No one is answering posts to the mailing lists.

In fact, the Apache HTTPD product was born because the NCSA server “lost its community”. The server’s primary developer, Rob McCool, left the NCSA in mid-1994, and the project stalled. People were still using the server, and users were circulating patches to correct this bug or add that feature. But, no one was creating a distribution that incorporated all the latest patches. In response, a small group of volunteers banded together to create the Apache HTTPD community, and the rest is history.

People being people, we are not always consistent. Sometimes when ASF folk say community, we mean the set of stakeholders. Sometimes, when we say community, we mean the core group of contributors that apply the patches and answer posts to the mailing list.

But regardless of how we use or misuse the word community, in the end, ASF committers still eat our own dog food. In the end, we are all trying to build the product that we want to use ourselves, in our own day jobs. Then we share the wealth, just in case other people might want to use the product too.

What to Do if Your Code Has Few, If Any Tests?

Event
  • What to Do if Your Code Has Few, If Any Tests?
  • Agitar Webinar with Ted Husted
  • 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. PST on Wednesday 26 April
    Everyone has worked on a code base that seems to work, but has almost no test assets. Maybe you?ve had some system-level tests or functional demos that provide a quick ?health check.? But you have nothing to validate functionality or test the corner cases. As a developer in this situation, you?re flying blind. That goes double if your code is a framework or application componentry.

Ted Husted, member of the Apache Struts development team, had exactly this problem with the open source Struts framework. He?ll be presenting a webinar on his experiences with using Agitar to investigate the Struts 1.2 code base and automatically create a series of unit tests. The presentation will provide an overview of what a typical developer would experience, how they need to think about exploratory unit testing, and how to make the most quality progress with a body of code that has few if any tests.

Registration for the 7 a.m. PST webinar, or the 5 p.m. PST one, is required.

For more information about Agitar Software, visit the www.Agitar.com website

Action2 MailReader - How Sweet It Is

Review

There’s a rough edge or two yet to file, but the
Action2 MailReader is up and running, along with it’s very own tour, and I’m ready to call it “code complete”. (And here’s the code.)

I can’t say I very much enjoyed writing yet-another MailReader tour (this makes three), but it was a useful exersice. To do the tour, I had to review the code again, and I found better ways to do some things in the process.

In porting both the MailReader and tour, I become more and more convinced that WebWork is Struts, only better. It’s everything we ever wanted in a 2.0 release, and more. As my new friend Claus Ibsen says, “I have the sweet eyes for WebWork.”

Roller 2.2 RC2 Available

Event

A new release candidate (RC) is ready for testing: Roller 2.2-rc2-incubating.

You can get the new RC here:

And these bugs found in RC1 were addressed (thanks Oscar and Axel):