10 Mar
2011
10 Mar
'11
7:24 a.m.
Hi everyone,
as for your morning entertainment I'll tell a little shortstory.
Get yourself a coffee - relax - and a few mins to read and think about it.
Back in 2004 2 Java Developers that were upset about EJBs published a
book with their thoughts and recommendations about how J2EE software
developement should be done in their minds. The 2 guys were Rod Johnson
and Juergen Hoeller, the book was "J2EE Development without EJB", and
they created the spring framework. Right from the beginning they were
sharing their thoughts with a community that quickly became larger.
I think every Java Developer knows the rest of the story - spring is the
leading free open source framework used in enterprise java dev and it is
today a subdivision of VMWare.
Left aside I have liked it more in its earlier days when it was not so
crowded -
checking the numbers from their forums there are roughly 80.000 members,
the forum which is run by vBulletin flags 5.500 as active.
http://forum.springsource.org
The interesting story about that is that there was an impressive flow of
knowledge from the masterminds to the people that joined in in a way a
pyramid of knowledge was building up. The senior members trained the
newbies and the newbies trained the next generation and so on. Some
members had their own ideas and started subprojects - I remember about
security - workflow -webservices and toolSuite. Once these subprojects
got a certain size they became an own module in the spring ecosystem
with an own forum (and their initiators became employees of springsource
and later VMWare).
Why am I telling this ?
This apporach feels much more "community" to me as the XWiki
"community". The Xwiki community seems to be of 2 parts: On one side a
small group of people developing the code and giving answers. On the
other side questioners that soon drop out once their problem is solved.
I wouldn't regard those being part of a"community" - I'd say they are
"requesters" - users just having a service request.
It may have to do with the media we are using - mailing lists - which is
not encouraging to keep a thread active (or easily visible) over a
longer lifecycle. In the years I've been working on spring based
projects I have done very rare contributions (requests and answers) to
the forum - most of the time a solution to my problem could already be
found in the existing contributions. What irony that Sergiu was the only
one to remember/find out that this topic had been deeply discussed in 2007 ?
Of course you can't compare a framework like spring to a solution like
Xwiki and it may be due to the inspiration and charisma of Rod that so
many people followed his voice and helped to build a community. Although
he was not as democratic as the XWiki founders - a lot of things weren't
discussed with the community. In the end it has been to everybodys
benefit I guess.
Coming back to my topic i cannot imagine how they could have done it
just with a mailing list.
One final word on the concern that running 2 different systems (a
mailing list for devs and a forum for users) might be too much of a
burdon for the poeple maintaining it: As for the example of spring there
weren't these 2 systems - it was all transparent on the forums. And I'm
still very much for hoping this pyramid to build up - at least for the
users stuff - that would be a relief for the devs !
Please think about it and reconsider your votes
still here is my +1 for the forum (which one to be decided in another
thread)
with a seperate developers list or not
Andreas