Re: [RT] Roadmap for Lenya 1.6 and beyond

[Michael Wechner <mi...@wyona.com>]

Comiotto Thomas wrote:

>> where do you see the advantages resp. disadvantages of Alfresco?
>> I think it would be nice if you could post a short summary such  that 
>> the Lenya community
>> can learn from it.
>>
>
> Maybe you too can post a short summary of the directions you take /  
> priorities you set with yanel? 


sure, please take a look at

http://yanel.wyona.org/principles.html
http://yanel.wyona.org/en/about.html
http://yanel.wyona.org/roadmap.html

whereas I think one of the most important is not really formulated 
explicitely:

I think a CMS such as for instance Lenya is being developed for 
people/companies actually using it or maybe in other words the "customer 
is king"

(a Google search resulted in 
http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/10/magazines/fortune/rule3.fortune/index.htm 
;-)

and it's not about money necessarily.

But it means it's business driven and not development driven and it 
seems to me that developers have a very hard time
accepting this (myself included), but it seems to me like a fact and I 
think it's important that one is able to accept this
and find ways how to deal with it.

I don't want to point any fingers or complain about it anymore, but this 
just doesn't seem to work out with some of the Lenya developers, whereas 
maybe the mindset has changed by today and I hope that will help Lenya 
to overcome it's problems resp.
getting a nice release out very soon. But some time ago this wasn't the 
case and I didn't see any change happening, so I decided to start 
something new instead having endless discussions or commit wars.

Maybe we will fail with Yanel and fall into the same traps, but at least 
we gave it a try.

Yanel is Open Source and also Apache lincense 2.0, so everyone can check 
it out and learn from it if one wants to.
Also all communication is done on public mailing lists and decision 
making is fully transparent.

> You did drop cocoon and created your  own small xml application server 
> for yanel, didn't you?


we don't use Cocoon as a core component, but I still believe the 
pipeline principle is a great thing and we will
definitely use it somehow. Also Lenya has some very nice principles 
which are still valid.

> We might be  able to learn from that too, besides that IIRC you never 
> pointed out  exactly what made you start writing another cms and 
> moving away from  using lenya for customer projects.


I thought it would have been obvious from the various emails I wrote, 
but if not, then I will be happy to explain.

Apart from the technical issues there are also human issues, but I don't 
think it's good idea to discuss this, because
it probably just ends up in a flame war and won't be very constructive. 
I think what counts is what people have learned from it and if people do 
it differently now.

> This might be a chance to make up  for this one.


make up for what?

Cheers

Michi

>
> Cheers
> Thomas
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@lenya.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@lenya.apache.org
>
>


-- 
Michael Wechner
Wyona      -   Open Source Content Management   -    Apache Lenya
http://www.wyona.com                      http://lenya.apache.org
michael.wechner@wyona.com                        michi@apache.org
+41 44 272 91 61


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

Re: [RT] Roadmap for Lenya 1.6 and beyond

[Jörn Nettingsmeier <ne...@apache.org>]

Michael Wechner wrote:
> I think a CMS such as for instance Lenya is being developed for 
> people/companies actually using it or maybe in other words the "customer 
> is king"

this is a very important point, but it's also a very double-edged sword.

as many list regulars know (i think i've been whining a lot), i got 
bitten by this issue quite badly during the last year, and i have cursed 
the endless development cycle and intrusive changes and trunk brokenness 
more than once.

but after delving in more closely, i found that the mess lenya was in is 
in part due to a very customer-oriented feature-driven approach.

we had lots of code duplication with really stupid bugs, horrible 
non-orthogonal interfaces, "works only in my special case" code, arcane 
features spread out over fifteen different files in six different 
languages and hastily introduced ad-hockeries by the wagonload. all to 
introduce a needed feature or to address a customer request, quickly.
all those things have piled up to become a very cumbersome legacy indeed.

when ranting to friends about this, i jokingly called it the "web 
designer approach to programming": everything's aimed at getting this 
new button into the user interface real quick, and as soon as it looks 
good, we go on to something else.
everything used to be just tacked on, instead of rethinking and 
restructuring existing code along the way.

now, after years of tedious clean-up work and refactoring, we are 
pulling ourselves out of the mess by our bootstrings, and things look good.

*.*

so yes, i do agree that we need shorter release cycles, incremental 
improvements and more rigorous QA in the future. in that respect, the 
customer should be king.

but we also need some moderation wrt introducing the neat feature of the 
day ("if you can't do it strictly self-contained, think harder or clean 
up the core until you can"), and we need to get our users to stay close 
to the trunk.
with lenya 1.2, i can't help thinking that every deployment was 
practically a fork. let's hope that with the modularization of 1.4, 
users will be able to keep their customizations in modules, sync with 
the trunk more easily and regularly and not drift into forks.


i think it's a matter of fairness to consider these legacy issues when 
discussing the path lenya has taken for the last 2 years - there has 
been much to learn for everybody involved.






-- 
Jörn Nettingsmeier

Kurt is up in heaven now.


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

Re: [RT] Roadmap for Lenya 1.6 and beyond

[Andreas Hartmann <an...@apache.org>]

Michael Wechner schrieb:

[...]

> I think a CMS such as for instance Lenya is being developed for
> people/companies actually using it or maybe in other words the "customer
> is king"
> 
> (a Google search resulted in
> http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/10/magazines/fortune/rule3.fortune/index.htm
> ;-)
> 
> and it's not about money necessarily.
> 
> But it means it's business driven and not development driven

[...]

>From my PoV, the issues which drive the developers aren't so much
different from the customer's requirements. At least in my personal
experience, the things Lenya lacks that hurt me most are basically
the things which make it unattractive for enterprise-level projects
(first of all the missing transactional back-end, which is an absolute
showstopper, and insufficient/unreliable scalability and performance
information). Another issue is that the document management is not
workflow-driven, but the workflow engine is wired into the user
interaction scenarios.

Customer-specific issues or features be fixed or added in the course
of a project (after all, there has to be something left to make money
with). But Lenya needs to strenghten its fundament to become really
successful. Unfortunately we didn't decide to follow this course
consequently with 1.4, but we still went on with our home-grown
repository.

Another issue is the editor situation. I have to admit that my ideas
how to improve web-based editing are quite limited. But it really
looks like Office integration can't be neglected these days.

The term "business driven" depends on what kind of business you have
in mind. I advocate the changes which I consider necessary to fulfil
the requirements of the companies I'd like to implement projects with.

-- Andreas


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