ComponentPlanet.org

Hello JContainer folks!

I imagine Leo Simons will have a number of things to say about it, but I 
wanted to give a heads up.  If you haven't seen it yet, Leo has 
announced [1][2] ComponentPlanet.org.  The domain has been registered 
but probably hasn't propagated through DNS yet.

Leo saw my post to the jcontainer list earlier this week and we began 
discussing the need for a "neutral ground" for component-container 
discussions.  Not development.  Discussions.  Tutorials, documentation, 
etc.  Each project be it Avalon, Picocontainer or Spring needs to have 
it's own space for development and that is fine.  It's a Good Thing. 
But this segregation has meant less communication between developers and 
leaves users jumping from project to project trying to find the "right" 
one.  What Leo and I are looking for is a place that isn't focused on 
code or implementations at all, or at least not promoting one 
implementation over the other.  Some place with a wiki, a blog 
aggregator, mailing lists, irc, and so on, but NO CVS.

JContainer is close to this goal, but we still had some concerns.  Being 
at Codehaus is both a pro and a con.  No offense, but we didn't want any 
hint of preference to container implementations and thus hosting the 
project at Codehaus might alienate developers from Avalon, Spring and 
other non-Codehaus projects.  Secondly, we wanted to include non-java 
projects.

So we're starting fresh and hope you and others will want to 
collaborate.  Things are, of course, just getting started.  If you have 
suggestions, thoughts or want to contribute, please let us know!

Thanks!

----
   jaaron  <http://jadetower.org>




[1] http://jroller.com/page/lsd/20040406#announcing_componentplanet_org

[2]  Leo's comments at the IRC meeting tonight in #ApacheAvalon:

you guys who know most of this, please bear with me for the intro
anyways, avalon is probably one of the projects that has been plagued 
most by oh, I dunno lets call it "friction"
in the "professional java world" at least.
lots of its contributors scattered, and that should've happened earlier, 
because great things are happening
like picocontainer
merlin
eclipse plugins
taking over the web application domain with IoC (nevermind its not avalon)
it has been clear to me (the old fart) that it is good to focus on a 
single product
for a community
avalon's community decreased a lot, people got to do what they liked, 
its working
  what have we lost here?
what have I lost, for example?
  peer review, suggestion, help. Frank comments about beer and whiskey.
there seems to be a clear need to have seperate codebases, seperate 
projects, fiefdoms if you will. This is because our problem domain is so 
broad and complex.
what's bad is that it just fragments a relatively small part of the java 
community even more
this is basically what caused the avalon mess.
avalon needs to focus on its single backbone.
so does pico
webwork
netkernel
different domains, different code
and that ends the intro.
I have just registered componentplanet.org
a place to be about everything but the code
with no rules but civilness
and tools to enable all kinds of thought sharing
okay, that's the topic. Seperate codebases, overlap in community. 
Free-form, web-style, no rules, no manifesto.
wdyt?