[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Clarification, and hopefully, a way forward

[Jason Etheridge]

On 12/18/06, Mike Rylander <mrylander at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me say also that it's very exciting to us to have such sudden and
> impassioned interest.  We weren't expecting such a quick uptake to be
> honest.  It is a little jarring, but also very heartening, to see such
> investment in the project, as surely many on this list are ...
> otherwise you all would have left long ago.  ;)

It certainly gives me warm fuzzies.  :D  On Slashdot, someone
commented that PINES hadn't _really_ staked their future on open
source with Evergreen, that we merely decided to license something
we've made under an open source license.  They're wrong.  We staked
our future on Evergreen, and the health of EG has always depended on
open source and the development communities it implies, and perhaps
now with the software proven, our own little community has reached a
certain critical mass on OPEN-ILS-DEV and -GENERAL (and I hope we can
all excuse some elbow rubbing).

I'd really like to encourage the folks from PINES (thanks Dusty!) to
peek their heads in here.  Evergreen has always been more than just 4
guys in a little dark room.  Say hello!

For the -DEV folks:

Please let us know if there are any specific areas of interest you'd
like to explore or want us to help with.  I know packaging/deployment
is the big one, but I personally hope I can lure some of you to the
dark side with staff client development.  It's probably one of the
easiest areas to delve into, and has the most room for improvement. ;)
 The current staff client is a mishmash of different ideas and
strategies; you'd fit right in.

I've even suckered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbrought in Mike and Bill in with a
few interfaces, away from their databases, OPAC, and middle layer.  We
keep throwing around the word XUL, but it's really the Mozilla
framework we're using here, and some of the interfaces are pure DHTML
(and we were doing AJAX before--though just barely--it became a
buzzword).

I'd also like to see clients on different technology stacks, if that
gives anyone an itch.  wxpython, Ruby on Rails, GTK, Qt... I know Bill
is working on a client-side python library.  I like to threaten folks
with Perl/Tk on occasion, and still dream of a doing a good old
text-based ncurses interface in my spare time *cough*. :D

> I invite everyone to read, digest and comment on this document, and
> all suggestions are welcome and encouraged.  Thanks again, and please
> stick with us as we all figure this stuff out!
>
>   http://open-ils.org/documentation/contributing.html

Any takers?

-- 
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/