Re: IBM i GUI Frameworks -- WEB400

Let me try to devide the Open Source projects up.

The are the tool-types, that typical evolves from a programmers or company's
specific need and where its is correct that the âOpen Sourceâ-part typical
will become a âspare time projectâ and then there are the bigger
âApplication Frameworksâ (AF) that is bound to a company's business needs in
order to make the business able to provide the AF as a product to its
customers and/or build âsellableâ applications or projects upon it.

There is a lot of these frameworks, and only few of them happens also to be
Open Source (I hope without restarting the discussion of the licensing
method).

powerEXT AF is intented to replace my old 5250 AF (started in 1990 and still
running) and my old CGIDEV2 WEB 1.0 AF (started in 2002 and still running)
and both support systems like ERP-, financial-, payroll-, ticketing-,
webportal- and a number of legacy systems etc.

powerEXT AF is however not a development based on the previous AF's code or
database design, it has design elements from these that has proven value,
but it is a complete new development.

Why an AF ? Simply because if you have several programmers working together
in project teams on big standard applications, you need a development
strategy and a framework to optain efficiency and to support consistency in
the system construction and the code.

Today I'm only a âone man shopâ, but experience has taught me the
effectiveness of following a strategy instead of jumping from one method
after another on a nearly day to day basis and therefore powerEXT is
constructed from a basic blueprint that took me a couple of full time
working month to make back in early 2009, the first version of the API's
took about 8 month of programming, without producing a single online
program/screen, and the online environment took only one month to program
and appeared first in late 2009.

One of the problems in regards to Open Sourcing an AF is that it requires
either extensive documentation on âhow to doâ and/or a lot of support and7or
education and any new installation will, at least in the start, generate
lots of demands for new features.

This will become a very time consuming process for one man and unless a
number of people and/or ISV's joins together in the effort to solve these
tasks, they are impossible to achive for a broader user group, especially if
this group want such services to be free or nearly free.

Another problem is that these new AF's is build on a number of ânew
technologiesâ many iSeries programmers is unfamiliar with. This has actually
nothing to do with Open Source but rather with the general problem many
iSeries developers faces, but it add's to the support complexity of the AF.

In fact there is a lot of considerations to be made on how to construct and
organize such a constellation and project, so any idears are welcome.

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Schmidt, Mihael <Mihael.Schmidt@xxxxxxxxxxx

wrote:

If a sourceforge project becomes dormant has nothing to do with sourceforge
itself. It only depends on the developers. Sourceforge gives you everything
you need for a project.

And putting it under the Apache umbrella won't do you any good because I
don't think that project would ever leave the incubation phase and thus will
gain no more attention than on sourceforge. It all comes down to the
developers.

Sourceforge ... keep in mind that most projects are done in the sparetime
of the developers as opposed to Eclipse or Apache projects which are mostly
supported/done directly or indirectly by companies.

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of ThorbjÃrn Ravn Andersen
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2010 9:25 AM
To: 'Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: Re: [WEB400] IBM i GUI Frameworks

> Making a succesfull international Open Source Group isn't so easy that
it

sounds, it actually requires some sort of non-profit organisation and

some

sort of management and cannot be done by a "one man army", just try to

visit

This is one of the things that Apache do very well.

If getting open source collaboration on a specific project is important, I
would consider doing it under the Apache umbrella, as they have the
necessary infrastructure, and a very good reputation and brand (as opposed
to yet-another-sourceforge-project-soon-to-be-dormant).

Just a thought

/ThorbjÃrn

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