| [technology-pmc] Re: Technology PMC Project Review |
Hello Ward, I'm happy to be able to give you a more complete view of the IDEforLaszlo project. The most significant issue we have dealt with is keeping up with the latest releases of Eclipse and the other tools we rely upon (like WTP). These releases seem to happen roughly quarterly and we have been spending some time rebuilding and placing interim builds on the web pages so that the community can take advantage of the latest software. Because this involves a good deal of testing with the new versions, we have recently enlisted a qa engineer to help us with task of building and releasing these interim milestones. As you are aware, we are working with eclipse to work out the details of giving a qa contributor appropriate access to bugzilla and the web pages. We believe that having a qa resource on the project will allow us to be more responsive to these changes. We have, in our opinion, reached the point where we can really start developing the IDEforLaszlo community. We have a stable software build, we have some infrastructure on the website, and we have been answering more and more questions on the mailing lists. The traffic about IDEforLaszlo seems to happen predominantly on the laszlo-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list which is a large established open-source community, with a few postings on the newsgroup at eclipse. In addition, we are actively soliciting help in moving the IDEforLaszlo forward. Now that we have worked out many of the build issues, we are moving forward with engaging help both from internal resources and in the community. We expect to have a another release within the next month that upgrades IDEforLaszlo to use Eclipse 3.1.2 and OpenLaszlo 3.2 (once it is released) and addresses some of the user-reported bugs. We are also planning on making progress more visible by adding a more comprehensive task list to the web pages to get the community contributing new pieces for IDEforLaszlo. I should point out that we have added a Developer Resources section to the web page as a start in this direction. We are also staying active in the Eclipse community. Max Carlson will be participating both on a panel at EclipseCon as well as giving a short talk. IDEforLaszlo is important to us and we strive to provide it with sufficient resources to ensure its success. However, Laszlo Systems, OpenLaszlo's sponsor, is a small company with limited resources. Accordingly we are reaching out to the community to improve our ability to move the project forward. As you may know, OpenLaszlo will soon be embracing DHTML as an alternate runtime, and we expect that this will also generate more interest -- and more community involvement -- in the IDE. We would appreciate any feedback based on your experiences with Eclipse projects on the most effective ways to garner community involvement. And, of course, any other feedback is also greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Amy Muntz On Feb 7, 2006, at 11:09 PM, Ward Cunningham wrote:
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