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Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:19:34 +0200
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Subject: Re: First impressions of a wannabe adopter
From: Sandro Martini <sandro.martini@gmail.com>
To: user@pivot.apache.org
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Hi all,
as Roger, I'd like to thank you for all the time dedicated to Pivot ...

Just some Info (I hope useful) from another point of view:
- usually in many open source products, the pain point is the
documentation, lack, outdated, or not so clear
  -- luckily here I think we need only to improve it, making it more
clear to new comers, and of course for this we need first some
feedback like this
  -- then we need to write it (in Javadoc inside sources, maybe with
dedicated tests, and maybe even with dedicated tutorials or samples,
and finally maybe updating even the web site) ... and as you know this
is a lot of work (usually done by me, but of course time is limited,
so if I do this I don't write code, but for me it's ok, as many knows
I'm not-so code-oriented :-) ... and there are some parts of Pivot
that still I know little like data binding
- we are bxml oriented, this is true, so maybe some simple (simple,
not trivial) example/tutorial on this could be good
  -- suggestions are welcome ...
- many times I get requests for fix/features, but it's a time
consuming process to better understand cusotmer needs, write a simple
test case to show the problem, before start looking at the fix
  -- even this is an area where help would be great


So in short:
any help anyone wants to give us is really welcome, and remember that
the code is only a small part (of course a critical part) of the
product.
During years in this project I have been doing many things (usability,
quality, web site pages and graphics, manage ci builds, manage jira,
manage release, publish release artifacts on maven repository, and
many other things ... ok, many only for PMC Members), and write
relatively small code (fix, new features/improvements, external
projects), etc ... but in open source I think this is good, anyone is
free to do a contribution depending on the knowledge, free time, and
interests; and there is no lower limit, anyone is free to do
something, when it has time, no deadlines, etc (generally speaking :-)
).
After some time/contribution to Pivot, a user could become a Committer
(Vote required by PMC) and get rights to commit in SVN repository, etc
... anyone of us has started from here, only some time and interest is
needed.
I can say that this is an interesting experience, from many points of
view, at least it is for me :-) .


To make this project alive we need the help and the continuous
feedback even from our users.
Swing are no more a future-proof investment, and JavaFX is stronger
any day, but I think that here we could continue to give a great
product, maybe see what feature to do, but this is another question
...


> I am currently prototyping a Caching Module to pool the GUI objects with BXML as the Object Factory.
this is interesting ... if you'd like to share with us, I could give
you grants for example in pivot-contrib (under apache-extras) so you
can put all in a new subproject, and if needed help you to have it
more aligned with our code base ... tell me if you like this

http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/pivot-contrib/


Note:
for 2.1 we have many new ideas, and if someone has others too, tell to
us (there are already many JIRA issues for all this stuff).
For example, I'd like to start thinking/writing:
- some modular approach, to simplify/improve writing complex
applications (but in a simpler way that full OSGi support already in
plan, but for the future)
- a new skin (with a flat look and maybe using a lot hardware
transparencies etc, even to show better how to extend Pivot for custom
solutions and custom components) ... maybe for apache-extras


Bye,
Sandro