On 10/07/2013 08:30 PM, Phil Steitz wrote:
On 10/7/13 7:40 AM, Ate Douma wrote:
Hi SCXML developers/community,
We are trying to figure out what the status and activity of SCXML
development is, and and/or who in the community might be
interested in re-activating it.
From the mailing lists and JIRA activity we gather not much has
been happening here for a very long time: the last release 0.9
dates back to December 2008 and the last serious code commits to
June 2011...
Looking back through the history of SCXML, Rahul Akolkar was and
pretty much still is the only maintainer of the code but seemingly
no longer able or willing to contribute much anymore.
So, what to do with Commons SCXML?
To put it bluntly, we would very much like to revive the
development of SCXML again.
Great.
We are working for Hippo (Open Source CMS vendor) and intend to
start using SCXML as state machine engine in our product shortly.
As the latest release is so old, and based on only Java 1.4, we're
looking into using the Java 6 (J6) branch instead. But this branch
is still 'work in progress' without any release (but targeted at
next major version 1.0).
This J6/1.0 branch AFAIK is intended to cover the final SCXML
specification [1], but already running quite a bit behind the
latest draft of that specification. However, this being a W3C
specification, having to wait for it to become final before
releasing a next major version of Commons SCXML seems very
counter-productive to me...
Both myself and Woonsan are Apache committers on several other ASF
projects for quite some time, so we know 'how it works'. We would
like to get out hands dirty, start contributing on Commons SCXML,
and help move it forward towards a more current release.
Great. We give sandbox commit to any ASF committer. Reply with
your availIds and we can get that done immediately.
Great!
For Woonsan and me that would be 'woonsan' and 'ate'.
Commit to
commons proper requires a little more process, but we can get that
done easily assuming you want to join us as committers.
We surely do.
And of course we understand and know that becoming commons proper committers
does require more. Which we're willing to provide :)
Being committers to the Commons sandbox however won't help us much right now as
SCXML already is in commons proper. So unless the current SCXML J6 branch is
'branched' into the sandbox (temporarily), we'll have to rely on others to
review and commit our contributions.
Maybe such a temporary SCXML 'branch' in commons sandbox would be a way to get
started?
But the question is: is there still anyone out here willing to
pick up and review contributions, discuss stuff, etc.
Hopefully Rahul can chime in (if still listening) and let us know
what his ideas and plans are, or else maybe other active members
of the Commons community?
Would be ideal if Rahul is still available / listening; otherwise
what you can count on is some random help / comments and help with
the release and build process.
That already would be great.
I've been trying to digest the release and build process as well as updating the
website (which for SCXML is seriously broken in some areas), which turns out to
be non-trivial to say the least ;)
I expect to come up with more detailed questions as well as patches soon.
I already opened up a relatively trivial JIRA ticket (SCXML-168), with patch
attached, last week but that hasn't seen a response yet.
But then, neither has many other open tickets for SCXML in quite a while...
As a minimum we would like to get a Java 6+ compatible version
released soon, maybe as a first milestone release towards 1.0, and
incrementally add (more) compliance to the current SCXML
specification.
For this we propose to 'archive' the current stalled trunk (move
it to a 0.xx branch or something), promote the current J6 branch
to trunk, and then take it from there. Website and documentation
fixes would be next to pick up and straighten out and updating the
current Maven build. Possibly drop the outdated Ant build as well
if nobody really is using or dependening on it anyway.
Sounds reasonable.
Great!
If nobody objects I can propose a more definitive and detailed plan in a few
days through a JIRA tickets and if still considered reasonable, hopefully
someone then can 'execute' it.
As said, we're willing to step up here, but as non committers for
Apache Commons we do need a 'handle' to get stuff moving again.
Welcome to commons!
Thanks!
Phil
Thanks, Ate & Woonsan
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/scxml/
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