Alan & Jon
I know that several have contributed to XMLSERVICE so has several others to
CGIDEV2.
But most IBM I/RPG Open Source projects are still to be considered a "one
man army project” with a little homepage and a support forum that forms the
actual "community".
If you take CGIDEV2, it was started back in 199x by Mel, later came
Giovanni and formed the easy/400 site. In the early days CGIDEV was
maintained and further developed along with web technologies, but when Mel
left the building and IBM/Rich took over in 2005 it came to a stop. Yes,
there have been tiny changes later but no major changes e.g. easy support
for XML and JSON etc. and no major releases have been made.
I’m not saying that CGIDEV2 isn’t well supported today, Giovanni does a
great job and provides an endless number of tools around CGIDEV2, but the
core hasn’t been updated.
If there had been a more formalized community around CGIDEV2 with several
core developers it would have been a more “up to date” project today with
extensive documentation and up to date demo's covering latest client
technologies, extensions that covered most common program types etc. and
several other project's (Such as my own powerEXT Core) had never seen the
day.
Unfortunately it lost its momentum back in 2005 where it had the chance of
becoming the main stream WEB connecter to the IBM I/RPG community. At that
time I actually suggested to form a group, but it was rejected by all. So I
ended up with creating my own project stack instead some years later:
http://184.172.184.159/~servus/pextdrupal/sites/all/themes/theme548/images/powerEXT_Core.png
And don’t tell me it couldn’t have been done, I know Kasper who started out
single handed with his Open Source project in 1999 and here is what became
of his project:
http://typo3.org/
The real problem, that you don’t have in the PHP world, but we face in the
IBM I/RPG world is both cultural and generational. 40 years of proprietary
thinking makes it extremely difficult to establish “group” projects because
everyone likes to be “king of the cops” and most of us aren’t used to the
form of collaboration you typical sees with the younger generation of
programmers that comes out of campus, most of us are self-learned stubborn
individualists and will identify us (when the end is near) with “I've lived
a life that's full, I traveled each and every highway, And more, much more
than this, I did it my way!”
In 2008 we actually managed to form a group of 3 companies under a project
called PUPFISH. The goal was to create a framework very much alike what
powerEXT Framework is today. The project stranded after 8 month development
due to failing in productivity because it lacked a blueprint defining the
end goal so we were just digging ditches on a day to day basis instead of
pursuing a common predefined goal.
What I learned of that was that Open Source isn’t equal to Wild West, big
Open Source projects needs goals, project management and blueprints as any
other commercial project and that can be very hard to obtain if you are
working with people that at hart are individualists and not are used to
collaboration.
In a historic perspective based on 10 year in the CGIDEV2 group I also find
it very unlikely and a little bit naive to expect “community extensions” in
a greater scale in XMLSERVICE. Yes, in regards to CGIDEV2, Kevin has
written Renaissance Framework and I have written powerEXT framework (both
based on a special version of CGIDEV2) and Giovanni has written tons of
utilities (including tools that incorporates Scott’s work) and many others
has contributed with their knowledge – but without a formal project
structure I wouldn’t call it extensions but rather projects in themselves.
Sorry if I have forgotten someone.
On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Jon Paris <jon.paris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2012-08-09, at 10:53 AM, web400-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
d) Providing an RPG-based solution *that could be extended and improved
by
the community* without waiting for IBM
Can you give me one example where ?the community? severely and in
collaboration has expanded and improved an existing Open Source project
on
IBM I?
Are you just looking for a commercial? Your own powerExt and Renaissance
both expand on CGIDEV2 - but it is not Open Source.
The question is irrelevant. This _was_ IBM's intention. Whether anybody
does it or not cannot change the intent. I hope it will happen - but many
folks seem happier to reinvent new wheels than to actually collaborate on
enhancing a project.
But there are a few examples: jt400 seems to work. WSDL2RPG enhances
HTTPAPI. Several people have added to Giovanni's tools - etc. etc. Not what
I'd hope to see but it is happening slowly.
Jon Paris
www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com
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