Why ComponentPlanet.org

By J Aaron Farr on Thursday, April 08, 2004

ComponentPlanet.org is about communication. It’s about discussions, random thoughts, blog entries, tutorials, and getting users and developers together. It is not about code. ComponentPlanet.org will seek to be a central location for development for Inversion of Control frameworks, Component/Container Oriented Programming, and applications of Separation of Concerns in any programming language. Eventually we’ll have a wiki, a weblog aggregator, white papers and tutorials, an IRC channel and mailing list, but no CVS. No code.

Why no code? Because there are already places for that. There’s Avalon, Picocontainer, Spring, Hivemind, Loom, Plexus, DNA, Netkernel, Dojo, Jicarilla and many others (and that’s just Java). And the diversity is a good thing. Each project and community needs to focus on its own project and its own releases. But at the same time there’s a lot of room for communication, for sharing ideas, for helping users understand the basics of these frameworks. We like being able to work on our own ideas but we want to know about others’ ideas too.

And so ComponentPlanet.org was born. Things are just starting right now. We barely have a wiki. But give us a week or two or three and we’ll have a lot more. We hope developers from all these various projects will be interested in collaborating. We won’t be pushing specifications or standards though we could certainly publish them and discuss them.

If you’re interested, comment on my weblog or Leo’s. Send us an email or put something in the new wiki. We’ll get more information out soon.

Leo’s announcement in the #ApacheAvalon IRC channel:


you guys who know most of this, please bear with me for the intro
anyways, avalon is probably one of the projects that has been plagued most by oh, I dunno lets call it "friction" 
in the "professional java world" at least.
lots of its contributors scattered, and that should've happened earlier, because great things are happening
like picocontainer
merlin
eclipse plugins
taking over the web application domain with IoC (nevermind its not avalon)
it has been clear to me (the old fart) that it is good to focus on a single product
for a community
avalon's community decreased a lot, people got to do what they liked, its working
 what have we lost here?
what have I lost, for example?
 peer review, suggestion, help. Frank comments about beer and whiskey.
there seems to be a clear need to have seperate codebases, seperate projects, fiefdoms if you will. This is because our problem domain is so broad and complex.
what's bad is that it just fragments a relatively small part of the java community even more
this is basically what caused the avalon mess.
avalon needs to focus on its single backbone.
so does pico
webwork
netkernel
different domains, different code
and that ends the intro.
I have just registered componentplanet.org
a place to be about everything but the code
with no rules but civilness
and tools to enable all kinds of thought sharing
okay, that's the topic. Seperate codebases, overlap in community. Free-form, web-style, no rules, no manifesto.
wdyt?

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