[Archive-access-discuss] On WERA

[Michael S. <st...@du...>]

I just came across this comment of Sverre's in issue "[ 1535953 ] WERA 
development still continuing?": 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1535953&group_id=118427&atid=681140.  
In case others have not seen it, I am posting it below to the list.

St.Ack

Date: 2006-09-29 00:44

Sorry for the late answer. 

I'll try to give my view on what will happen to Wera. 
I've been involved in Wera development since the start in 
2000. Currently i'm the only developer working on Wera from 
time to time. I'm an employee of the National Library of 
Norway (NB), which uses Wera for access to their Web 
Archive, so naturally the effort put into Wera is driven by 
the needs of NB. During the latest months focus has been 
elsewhere in NB, and only a fraction of the Web Archive is 
available through Wera. The activities on indexing and 
access will be taken up again early next year. When that 
happens we will maintain Wera to fit the needs of NB. 
However, We will also be monitoring the developement of the 
Open Wayback. If/when Open Wayback is able to fulfill our 
needs as access tool we will have to decide wether to 
switch to Open Wayback or stay with Wera. We may also find 
that some parts of Wera can be replaced by parts of the 
Open Wayback. E.g. the Document Retriever of Wera is a weak 
link in Wera since it only handles the files within one 
directory (and not subdirectories).

As long as someone sees the need for and is willing to take 
on the further development of Wera it will live. Every time 
i stumble into projects or persons that uses Wera for 
access i get a bit bewildered. Why is it that Wera get no 
new developer volunteers and few feature requests / bug 
reports are submitted to sourceforge when there are so many 
users? Must be a pretty good system, huh? Or is it that 
these users do not believe Wera will survive for very long 
and they don't want to invest any time of effort in a dying 
system. Has it something to do with Wera not being pure 
Java?

I really don't know. All i know is that i would like you 
(the users of Wera) to share your opinion on these matters.

Thanks
Sverre