RE: Attracting companies to FOP (was: Re: Public API Change in Driver)

[Arved Sandstrom <Ar...@chebucto.ns.ca>]

At 11:29 AM 8/10/01 +0200, Ronald Jaramillo wrote:
>IMHO fop should present itself on the website in a much better way.
>The developers on this list may think     there is a long way to go, but
>that depends on how
>you look at it. For what we needed in our company fop was ready for prime
>time.
>I think the site should be more especific about what fop is able to do right
>now, maybe show
>some examples/screen-dumps of tables, svg, images or some unicode documents.

You're right. We don't present this information at all well. We have a 
couple of files, not necessarily up to date, for implemented features and 
limittaions, and that's it.

>Arved wrote
>>I look at OS projects like Subversion and I'm green with envy.
>Well on theirs   site, they has a section devoted to well define specific
>task that need to be done.
>Thats something we should do for fop site as well.
>For instance, it could be nice to define what it takes to implement
>background image support.
>Or feature x. I think this model will fit better whith the way fop is been
>developed ( people poking at
>it on their spare time, comming and going ).
>Having an overview of what fop supports, and a list of what need's to be
>implemented grouped in self contained
>task could be a good place to start. Then a developer/company can see if
>their problem can be solved with
>fop, and if not they can stimate what it takes to implement what they need.

These are very good points. We have a number of developers/committers with 
lesser or greater knowledge of FOP guts that could possibly leverage their 
knowledge better. Take myself as a case in point: I know FOP well enough 
that I can dive in almost anywhere (OK, SVG and fonts are weak points for 
me, but you get the idea). But if I have 5 hours a week to spend on FOP, is 
that not better spent recording what I know about FOP design and 
implementation, and making that information available? It's sort of like the 
Biblical saying about providing people with fish (which is what I've been 
doing), as opposed to teaching people to fish. Not only that, telling them 
_where_ they should fish. :-)

Perhaps you saw my recent post to Karen Lease and others (that Karen replied 
to) that was along these lines, somewhat, albeit focusing on tables. So I 
think the thought has been on the radar horizon.

Lots of good suggestions here. All of which I think deserve high-priority 
attention. I'll certainly start doing this kind of stuff immediately after 
the 0.20 release this weekend.

Regards,
Arved Sandstrom

Fairly Senior Software Type
e-plicity (http://www.e-plicity.com)
Wireless * B2B * J2EE * XML --- Halifax, Nova Scotia


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