Last week’s JavaOne had a separate track on open source, and there’s been a substantial number of very interesting panels, discussions and presentations. However, i felt that these talks concentrated mostly on big, well-established and very broad open-source communities. While it is perfectly understandable, the few dozens of these high-profile communities do not reflect the specific problems of a much vaster landscape of the open-source in general. Here I’m talking about literally hundreds of thousands of projects that only have a single active developer. I call it the “party of one” type of project, and these pose a number of quite significant challenges to their “owners”, especially if it is done as a part time hobby. I had a number of such projects (where i am the only developer) over the last decade, and some of them are still quite active. This series talks about the specifics of one-man projects and how to maintain a long-term level of commitment.
First, a little bit of statistics from SourceForge:
Statistics, of course, can be used to back up pretty much any point of view, but i do believe that the numbers above are a good reflection on what happens when a developer out there has an idea. Nowadays, it is extremely easy to find a free web-based code repository and wait for the entire world to come. However, the absence of any entry-level barrier to create a project quite often results in the idea being just that – an idea. Just over half of SourceForge projects have any kind of downloadable content, and i’m sure that you saw your share of great ideas that died once their creator faced the first major implementation hurdle (or even when his level of interest in implementing the idea never matured to the actual coding).
While it is difficult to create even a first implementation, it is even more difficult to maintain the level of commitment and arrive at a stable release. As you can see, only one in every six projects were deemed to be stable by their own developers.
When all you need to create a project is an Internet connection and enough imagination to come up with a name, you have another interesting side effect. While every project has a potential to reach millions of developers, they all compete for the eyeballs and attention span of those few tens of thousands that are looking. You can have a great idea, you can even have a great implementation, but most certainly you can’t expect everybody to come. It is a big world out there, and the competition for the attention is even bigger.
It takes determination, commitment and perseverance to be willing to continue working on a project when nobody but you seems to be interested in it. It takes discipline and clear prioritization to understand that while coding is fun, every project has less pleasant (to us as the developers) tasks, such as bug fixing, testing, documenting and promoting. It doesn’t matter if your project is big or small. However, if you’re the only one working on your project (and here is specifically don’t use “the only developer”), you don’t have anybody else to do the “boring” tasks. And without understanding what these tasks are, and being ready to step up and make sure that all these secondary tasks get done – you might as well not begin in the first place.
The next entries will talk about the specific project tasks.
- Part 2 talks about the development
- Part 3 talks about the maintenance
- Part 4 talks about the promotion
- Part 5 summarizes the discussion
The images are available under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license from the following flickr.com streams:
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
- Christophe Le Besnerais has a custom implementation of Paint interface to paint a glossy button with arc-shaped gradient. Paint is one of the more advanced concepts in Java2D and it’s tricky to create a performant implementation. The only visual thing that is missing for here in the whole “web 2.0” concept is the soft-clipping along the arc itself (especially visible if you change the value of the third slider that controls the color of the top part. Chris Campbell has written about this problem before, and his solution involves an intermediate image.
- Roman Kennke posts an update on progress of Caciocavallo project that aims to create an AWT implementation for X Window System without using any of Sun’s internal classes.
- Jacek Furmankiewicz continues working on the SwingBuilder project, adding more support for bindings, long running tasks and integration with Commons Validation.
- Hans Muller‘s swan song has been sent to the users mailing list of AppFramework (reference implementation of JSR 296). I have already mentioned that this project has been effectively dead for the last six months, and Hans has quite a long list of to-do things in his posting. This project has been heavily promoted throughout the entire desktop track at JavaOne this week, and even though Amy Fowler assures that it will continue to be developed, it would be wise to wait and see if the words are backed by @Actions :)
- Geertjan Wielenga writes about using Maxim Zakharenkov‘s SwingExplorer inside a NetBeans module.
And some stray thoughts on JavaOne:
- Underpromise and overdeliver. Good example – the playback video support for JavaFX and Java. Bad example – javafx.com.
- I wonder why the video support hasn’t been featured more prominently during the keynote (instead of the frozen single-threaded demos). This is a very significant step forward for client Java, much more so than glitzier eye-candy dragging applets to the desktop. On the other hand, when the hype is that applets are back, who am i to judge?
- I was almost hoping that the video support would address the number one wish i had for desktop Java in 2008 – cross-platform support for H.264 and FLV. We’re still not there yet – the cross-platform codecs are rather unknown in the general desktop area (one from On2, and another from the Open Media Commons project that has yet to deliver any binaries), and H.264 and FLV will only be supported when native codes are installed.
- And no, those were not 200 different video streams mapped on the rotating cube. Those were 200 different views on a handful of different video streams. Still impressive.
- The best presentation that i have attended did not use a single slide from Sun’s template. Those of you who are familiar with work of Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte should already know the answer to “why?”, and Ben Galbraith’s reputation has apparently allowed him to swerve past Sun’s lawyers and copywriters to present a very strong, clean and focused talk on user and interaction design.
- And while we’re at it – do we really have to ruin every single session title and slide that use the word Java? I think we can figure out if Java is Java™ technology, Java™ platform or Java™ programming language by ourselves . At least they didn’t turn “Effective Java” into “Effective Java™ Programming Language”…
- Literally bending and picking ugly things off the stage, having dozens of people come and go, showing IDE screens with 50+ lines of code, demoes freezing on the most important day of the year. Makes one wonder why Steve Jobs’ presentations get so much hyped before, during and after…
We’ve just finished presenting our Birds-of-Feather session on high resolution monitors. Thanks to everybody for coming at such a late hour, and thanks to Mike for presenting this session with me. To all of you who attended but want to see the slides once again, and to those of you who couldn’t attend, here are the slides:
Here are some Swing links that you might have missed during this week:
