What is the state of turbine?

Hello!

I am currently working in a big web application project with a few fellow
developers. When we started out we were discussing a lot on which framework
to use. I was familiar with turbine and I liked it very much. However the
others were skeptical since there is very few persons involved in turbine at
the moment. We decided to work with php and Zend and we have made a quite
cool alpha version of out app. However, me and the other main developer
(both computer engineers) have realized that the php community does not have
very good understanding of concepts as best practices when it comes to
object orienting, testing, database management and so on. Especially for
complex applications. We are now considering switching framework and we are
looking at java-based frameworks. (Because java rules)

 

We have looked at other apache frameworks such as tapestry and struts (which
are much more active). But to me it seems as if they do not address the
things that I really like about turbine and that I feel are basic in the
kind of application we are developing. For instance no other framework seems
to have a user class (or interface) which I think is a basic feature since
validations on the user are done on almost every page. Further on, if there
is some kind of permission system, it is always role-based and not
group-role-based which we need.

 

So my question is.. Is turbine dying? Or is it already dead? And why?

I am not _that_ experienced in developing complex web applications. Does
turbine have some kind of major flaw that I don't see?

 

What I like and what I am looking for is this:

-          The security system - group-role-based

-          Tight integration with velocity (which of course can be
accomplished in other frameworks as struts). And what I like with velocity
is that the templates looks very much like static html, i.e. they are very
readable. I don't like jsp.

-          The torque object model that is generated

-          A clear file structure for the environment. (What I like in
turbine is that I can create a folder for x number of pages and then create
a default.java class in the corresponding package and have the same
permission check for all those pages)

 

The biggest flaw I think turbine has is that it isn't really maven 2
compatible. I really like working with maven, but I prefer not to use
version 1.

 

I'm just sending this since I think it's sad that it is not used anymore and
I wonder why.

Any reply/discussion would be appreciated.

/Ludwig