> -----Original Message----- > From: Geir Magnusson Jr [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 10:46 AM > To: general@incubator.apache.org > Subject: Re: [Wicket] As erspective podling candidate > > do *they* want to? why would they want to move? >
Geir, I've been tracking the progress of the Wicket community for a while now, as I've personally adopted Wicket as a web application development framework, both privately and professionally. As part of my tracking of the project, I became aware last December that the Wicket core developers were planning an exit strategy from Sourceforge. I immediately felt like Wicket would be a great candidate for Apache, not just because of the innovation of the technology, but because they already had a healthy and vibrant developer, user, and support community. I asked Alex Karasulu if he thought Wicket would be a good fit for Apache, and he readily agreed. It was at that time that both Alex and myself approached the Wicket team to determine if there was an interest level on their part in possibly moving to Apache. Their interest is VERY high in moving to Apache, but they had some questions and concerns. Some have been addressed, but some issues remain outstanding. For instance, they understand that incubation is necessary, but they very concerned about continued support of their already mature product and user base, and the long-term future of Wicket. In essence, they are exhibiting the some of the core characteristics of what an Apache PMC is supposed to do. Wicket is no one-man show. They have a core set of about half a dozen developers, with a number of other second-tier contributors. Their user community is heavily involved in wiki contribution and providing user-contribs of Wicket component extensions, and integrations with technologies like Spring and Hibernate. Others, like myself, are interested in Wicket's natural affinity to live in OSGi, with or without a servlet container. The core developers have a detailed roadmap for future growth of the technology, and they readily include their user community in helping prioritize new features. Their user mailing is very active (125-175 posts/day), and the core developers are readily accessible via mailing list and IRC. Additionally, they are under contract to product a Wicket-In-Action book, which is currently be written. Bottom line is that Wicket WILL move from Sourceforge. The only question is where and when. They are getting ready for a 1.2 release within the next month. After that, they want to move the project before starting on the 1.3 release path. They are very interested in Apache, but are naturally concerned about incubation. They will want to move as quickly through the incubator as possible, and I believe the maturity of their developer community will facilitate. They know they have things to learn about the Apache Way, but they will be motivated to demonstrate this as quickly as possible in order to exit as a top level project at Apache in preparation for their 1.3 release. As such, they feel they will be demanding to their incubator mentor(s) and they would like some assurances of having enough Apache support. Moving Wicket is an expensive endeavor both in time and resources, not to mention the impact to the user community. It is a job they want to do once, so they are being very careful and diligent in choosing their new home. IMO Apache has a great opportunity to bring one of the next brightest technologies under the ASF umbrella. Wicket is interested in Apache. If Apache is interested in Wicket, then I would gladly offer my assistence in helping facilitate further discussions between the necessary peeps within Apache and the core Wicket dev team. Regards, Timothy Bennett [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
