Future Cactus Development Status

[JeffTaillon <je...@openpole.com>]

Hello all


I am a bit puzzled about the development status and to be honest a bit
worried about its evolution.
The JIRA does show much commit during the last year.
J2EE 1.4 is not already supported and the 1.5 spec is out.

Globally it leaves the impression that not much is happening.

Can you confirm about the status of this project?
Is it slowly phasing out?
If so, what is the reason, replace by a more popular solution for similar
tests.

Please advise?

Tks a lot


Jeff

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Future-Cactus-Development-Status-tf3029727.html#a8418594
Sent from the Cactus - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: cactus-dev-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: cactus-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org

Re: Future Cactus Development Status

[Felipe Leme <fe...@gmail.com>]

Hi Martin,

Martin van den Bemt wrote:
> As far as I can see, most committers don't have the time anymore to do cactus work or moved to other
> things in life.

That's true. Vincent Massol, Cactus founder and main developer, is 
working on other projects. A couple of years ago, Nicolas Chalumeau and 
myself joined the project. Unfortunately, Nicolas passed way, and I 
slowly faded away, mostly for personal reason (I haven't contributed too 
much for any OSS project and the last months).

> What I get from other people is that Cactus is still something that deserves work being done to keep
> it alive and get it up-to-date, but to do that we need more volunteers (new blood) and volunteers
> within Jakarta to get those volunteers aboard / start applying patches.

Yes, I agree. I tried to at least keep the contributors alive, but am 
lacking behind the work (for instead, a have a starred conversation 
regarding a patch from  William Ferguson dated of 2006-01-05, i.e., it's 
been stalled for 1 year). My last effort was to get a SOC contributor, 
but our proposal didn't get a ranking high enough to get the funding. 
Fortunately, though, the student, Petar, haven't give up and continue to 
work in the project; I've been in talk with him privately in the last 
days, but haven't got the time to apply his work yet.

> I hope Filipe can give some feedback on possible actions and if he can find some time to guide this?

It's Felipe, not Filipe :-).
Anyway, I think the most important think to do is to finish the Cargo 
integration and release Cactus 1.8 (hopefully using the M2 build). Doing 
so will renew the project energies, opening the discussions regarding 
the project future (for instance, which Java EE versions to support).

> For Filipe : another possibility could that we get a discussion started on general to see if there
> are any Jakarta people willing to help out ?

Yes, that might be a good idea. There were many people interested in the 
testing.apache.org effort last year, but once it got the first negative 
feedback from the boarding meeting, the enthusiasm faded away (I'm not 
blaming everybody, much the opposite - I am the one who should keep the 
TLP effort going, but for personal reasons could not make it).

Anyway, even if get the attention of these people, they would most 
likely work in the project as volunteers. So, another think that might 
help, is to find a company to sponsor the project, i.e., to hire people 
to work full-time in Cactus (and other testing projects in general; 
that's one direction I would like to take the testing.apache.org if it 
got created).
I know that's harder, but maybe it's a question of approaching the right 
  people in the right companies (for instance, it might be interesting 
for Sun to have Cactus providing Java EE 5 testing for Glassfish 
integrated into NetBeans). Notice that most of the successfully active 
projects (Tomcat, Maven, Derby, etc...) are backed by paid developers. 
I, for one, would love to be such a developer, but unfortunately do not 
have the 'political influence' to pursue it (i.e., do not know the right 
people in the right places :-(.

>> The JIRA does show much commit during the last year.

That's true. Most - if not all - committed work was the changes 
regarding the bundled LGPLed JBoss jar.

>> J2EE 1.4 is not already supported and the 1.5 spec is out.

The problem in supporting J2EE 1.4 and Java EE 5 is that it would 
require some heavy refactoring in the way the build is structured. We 
might need to make some sacrifices for that refactoring, like stop 
supporting J2EE 1.2, for instance (I don't that would be a real 
sacrifice, though). Anyway, porting the build to Maven 2 might help this 
effort.

>> Globally it leaves the impression that not much is happening.

Unfortunately, that's mostly true. I mean, it's just not completely true 
due to Petar's work, which has been in 'stealth mode' so far

>> If so, what is the reason, replace by a more popular solution for similar
>> tests.

I don't think there is an alternative for Cactus; the main alternative 
would be out-of-the-container testing (or no testing at all, as it 
happens most of the time :-). The main problem, as Martin already 
pointed out, is the lack active developers.


-- Felipe


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: cactus-dev-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: cactus-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org

Re: Future Cactus Development Status

[Martin van den Bemt <ml...@mvdb.net>]

As far as I can see, most committers don't have the time anymore to do cactus work or moved to other
things in life.
What I get from other people is that Cactus is still something that deserves work being done to keep
it alive and get it up-to-date, but to do that we need more volunteers (new blood) and volunteers
within Jakarta to get those volunteers aboard / start applying patches.

I hope Filipe can give some feedback on possible actions and if he can find some time to guide this?
For Filipe : another possibility could that we get a discussion started on general to see if there
are any Jakarta people willing to help out ?

Mvgr,
Martin

JeffTaillon wrote:
> Hello all
> 
> 
> I am a bit puzzled about the development status and to be honest a bit
> worried about its evolution.
> The JIRA does show much commit during the last year.
> J2EE 1.4 is not already supported and the 1.5 spec is out.
> 
> Globally it leaves the impression that not much is happening.
> 
> Can you confirm about the status of this project?
> Is it slowly phasing out?
> If so, what is the reason, replace by a more popular solution for similar
> tests.
> 
> Please advise?
> 
> Tks a lot
> 
> 
> Jeff
> 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: cactus-dev-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: cactus-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org