Re: what is current status and likely future of turbine ?

Nick Ide wrote:
>
> We have built several projects in the past using turbine.
> We are beginning a new project and trying to decide whether to
> use turbine or try something else. We are a little concerned that 
> turbine is dead or dying from lack of community.
>
> My questions:
>
> 1. When will turbine 2.3.3 be released ?
We hope to release 2.3.3 real soon now.  The blocker is that we want to 
use Torque 3.3 and we want to wait another week before voting on that so 
that people will have had a chance to provide feedback on it's RC-3 
release.  I don't believe we have any plans for a 2.3.3 RC release - 
straight to final would be my suggestion.
> 2. Is anybody working on that release ?
Thomas V. and myself are working on this as time permits.
> 3. Is there any active work on the turbine code base ?
As time permits we (and this includes Siegfried and others) are working 
on tidying up the trunk in order to get to a 2.4 release, but progress 
is indeed very slow.
> 4. If there is no work, is that because it all just works or because 
> everybody has abandoned turbine in favor of something else ?
It is probably fair to say that many have moved to other frameworks that 
are more in vogue, however there are plenty of people that have existing 
applications that need to be maintained into the future so support for 
and slow forward progress of turbine should still occur.  Your point 
about stability may also be true to a certain extent.
> 5. Probably asking the crowd since the people who voted with their 
> feet have stopped listening, but what do you suppose
> people have adopted to use instead of turbine ?  is it VelocityStruts 
> ?  is it Spring ?  Others ?
There will be no short answers to this question.  There are plenty of 
interesting frameworks out there with various pros and cons and 
certainly many of them have a lot more momentum than turbine.  Of course 
the framework that best suits you will be different from the one that 
best suits me or anyone else.

I am a big fan of ExtJS (http://extjs.com/) so I'm going to favour 
solution that integrates nicely with that.  Mucking about with 
JavaScript all the time is a PITA so I may take a look at GWT with 
gwt-ext (http://code.google.com/p/gwt-ext/) some time.  Tapestry 5 
(http://tapestry.apache.org/tapestry5/) is looking fairly interesting, 
though a 1.0 release may still be a little while away.  But neither of 
these are exactly main stream and I certainly have not looked to see if 
these support the range of services that are available with turbine.

I am certainly interested to see responses from others, with 
justifications (and why various alternatives were ruled out).

Another option to consider is diving in and helping with turbine.  It 
sounds like you have a long term interest in the continued support of 
turbine so why not invest a little time in keeping it moving forward.  
After a couple of decent patches we are usually fairly happy to vote on 
commit access.

Scott