The Goldfish Chronicles

Something I should probably advertise.

Jakarta BCEL has been a bit of a norwegian blue parrot recently. The committing community had dried up while the user community continued to post bugs and post patches. Obviously a bad situation.

We were left with the choice of whether to find some way to pension BCEL off into a corner, or try to reinvigorate activity in the community. No guesses for the one we’re trying first.

I’m not a user of BCEL, and I’d heard from quite a few people that ASM is the way to go. So I did the necessary asking around (codehaus irc channel I suspect), and also asked the bcel-dev list whether we should just be suggesting people use ASM instead. The best analogy I got was that BCEL/ASM is much like DOM/SAX (or is it SAX/DOM?). Two different ways to view a problem, one of which is inherently going to be faster, but both have their uses.

So we decided to apply the reinvigoration cream. Three Jakarta committers volunteered to be more active (Simon Kitching, Henning Schmiedehausen and Conor MacNeill) and we added two new committers to the project (Dave Brosius of FindBugs and Torsten Curdt of Cocoon/Commons).

We just completed the migration from CVS to SVN today (I’m having fun this quarter organising lots of these) and hopefully the patches can start to fly in to get an updated version released, and then maybe some more exciting ideas?

Anyway, (sounding like Ronnie Corbett, a classic comedian of shaggy dog stories) to cut a long story short, feel free to join the bcel-user or bcel-dev list if you’ve anything you’d like to say or contribute to bcel.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2005 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.