Cooee - Branch of Echo2 Project

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, June 14, 2007 @ 5:38 am

I've thought for a while now that Echo2 wasn't really working as an Open Source project; I even have a couple of posts laying out some of the reasons that Echo2 was in danger of losing out to other, inferior frameworks all for a lack of organization and activity. Ultimately I didn't post them because I didn't want to undercut what I considered to be an otherwise excellent framework. But it's not surprising that someone else has felt the same way and taken action to rectify the situation.

Cooee, a fork of the Echo2 project, aims to make community participation much easier. From the FAQ:

What we're doing is trying to provide a much more open environment to stimulate the growth and acceptance of Echo2 / Cooee. We've spent a lot of time making sure that everything that happens as part of the Cooee project can directly benefit the work of Nextapp and other projects like EchoPointNG. For instance, all changes to the code base are tracked through JIRA, and marked appropriately in the commit comments. This means applying the changes / fixes we make back to Echo / EchoPointNG are exceptionally easy.  To put it simply - we want to work with Echo and maintain as much API compatibility as possible.  Not work against it.

The project has all the usual Open Source fixings: JIRA (bug reports), Confluence (wiki), Bamboo (continuous integration), forum, and Fisheye. It consolidates the several different jar files of Echo2, Extras and EchopointNG into a single jar file. A few other Echo2 related projects are also maintained on the site. It's early days yet, so the project doesn't seem to have a lot of momentum, but from the public roadmap to JIRA, they seem to be doing a few things right. Ultimately their success will depend on their ability to recruit other developers. The same is true, by the way, for the main Echo2 project.

Open source forks are not always a good thing. Sometimes an already small community gets split so far that the projects die of neglect. Of course Echo2 has  been so moribund for the last few months that I think this particular fork is a good thing. The folks from NextApp seem to have gotten a kick in the pants as a result of this development. I've never seen them this engaged in the forum.

Let the competition begin.

agile ajax

Comments

• Leave a comment
• Comment feed for this post
• TrackBack URL

None so far.

Leave a comment