I see there's some discussion about the next release of Sanselan between Damjan
Jovanovic, Gary Gregory (I'm the other Gary) and some of the Apache community
leaders. My name was even mentioned... so I thought I'd chime in.
First off, Damjan posted a note to the issue tracker that my submitted patches
for performance enhancements aren't going to make it into the 1.0 release.
While I'm naturally disappointed about that, I can understand the perspective
that it is probably the best choice at this time. Also, a delay would give us
more time to refine the concept before we start applying it to other areas of
the code. The only point I would add here is that I think Sanselan does have
problems with performance and that those problems are really unnecessary. Java
is plenty fast nowadays and there's nothing wrong with the Sanselan code per
se, just a rather an unlucky choice on which API element to use for setting
pixel values in an image. I think that the kind of changes proposed for one
small area of the code base (TIFF images) would have applicability to other
parts of the code. I also think that performance is probably one of the issues
might keep Sanselan from reaching a broader user base. So I'd encourage
everyone interested in Sanselan development to keep that in mind for future
releases.
In terms of renaming the project from "Sanselan" to "Image" or something like
that. Well, I think the key issue here is that the change in name would signal
a much more ambitious concept of what the project is for. To me, the name
Sanselan says "I'm a small and unassuming software package focused on a
particular niche application." The name "Image" or something like that says
"I'm gunning for the JAI, and it's high time somebody did it too". I wonder if
the reason that the original authors chose the obscure name was that their
intentions were fairly modest, though with the amount of work that went into
Sanselan it seems a shame not to promote it. So I'm strictly on the fence
about the whole name change thing.
Finally, I wanted to ask if there would be any problems in changing the
compiler targets in the pom.xml to 1.5 for release 1.0. The current compiler
targets are set up to compile with Java 1.4 features, but I just switched them
to 1.5 and everything build and tested without errors. I'm not proposing that
anyone go make code changes to Sanselan so that it uses generics or other 1.5
fixtures. Just compile the current code to accommodate 1.5 rather than being
stuck in the 1.4 feature set. By switching release 1.0 to Java 1.5 does have
the advantage that in any new work, coders will be able to use 1.5 without
compatibility issues.
Gary
Computer Programming is the Art of the Possible
Gary W. Lucas
Sonalysts, Inc.
215 Parkway North
Waterford, CT 06385
