Re: [Dynapi-Dev] Is this project dead?

[Doug M. <do...@cr...>]

I belive I was given Admin access myself.
Unfornutatly I lost my sourceforge password a very long time ago
and have since given up on their system ever giving my my password.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Leif W" <war...@us...>
To: <dyn...@li...>
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 10:43 PM
Subject: Re: [Dynapi-Dev] Is this project dead?


> >
>> Andrew Gillett; 2005-03-29@20:25 -0500
>>> David King wrote:
>>> There are PHP errors all over the web site.  No word from any project 
>>> admin.  Last stable release was 2.5.7 in January 2002.  Latest 
>>> development release was 3.0 Beta 1 in June 2003.  Virtually no 
>>> activity on this mailing list since Octorber 2003.  What happened 
>>> that killed all activity on this project?
>>
>> I have a few theories.
> 
> Yeah it's difficult to answer.  It's difficult to read.  I've always 
> been on the fringes (since just before they went to SourceForge), not 
> contributing too much but following along and doing what I can.  Trying 
> to figure stuff out has gotten a little more difficult.  There are so 
> many techniques used in the code in DynAPI 3 that it's hard to get my 
> head around sometimes.
> 
>> The administrators of the project seem to have all moved on and there 
>> doesn't seem to have been any effort made to find new volunteers to 
>> administer the project.
> 
> I'm not an admin, but I seem to be able to mess with (read, 
> write-modify, write-new) most of the files in the web tree.  I can read, 
> write and create files within any given CVS module, but I have not tried 
> creating new modules or removing the "mistake"/empty modules.  Anyways, 
> perhaps something more could be done to get more people involved?
> 
>> Genuine cross-platform JavaScript gurus are not as common as you might 
>> think.
> 
> I used to be pretty good with using DynAPI 1, never really got the hang 
> of DynAPI 2, and got away from the DynAPI during most of the DynAPI 2 
> life cycle.  I came back at the end of DynAPI 2 and the beginning of 
> DynAPI 3.  I've got minimal understanding of DynAPI 3 I think.  I 
> sucessfully added a little widget thingy, and half-arsed some PHP/SODA 
> stuff but never got around to completing or integrating submitted code. 
> I always seem to get sidetracked, which is my own SNAFU, nothing to do 
> with DynAPI.  If I were working a specific job (pay or volunteer) and 
> using this stuff with other people, I'd be less likely to be distracted. 
> :)
> 
>> There is a huge learning curve with DynAPI.
> 
> Ain't that the truth.  It's actually not all that bad.  It's just not 
> always well documented.
> 
>> DynAPI has an elegant object model that makes it much easier to build 
>> complex web applications.
> 
> That's a reason why it should be alive, not dead.  ;-)
> 
>> However its focus on supporting old browsers with strange event 
>> handling mechanisms (Netscape 4.7) means that parts of it are far more 
>> complicated than they would be if it only modern browsers were 
>> supported. This complexity means that you can't just take a JavaScript 
>> programmer off the street, ask them to work on the DynAPI core and 
>> expect anything to happen in a hurry.
> 
> I remember the heyday in 1999 with DynAPI 1 on the brand-new version 4 
> browsers.  I remember discovering each week at least 5 subtle ways in 
> which both IE and NN were broken, and another 5 ways in which they 
> behaved differently.  The differences were in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and 
> even form submissions.  (ex. NN4 used to submit an empty text field as 
> two spaces, so server side scripts needed to handle this).
> 
>> What alternatives are there?  domapi (http://www.domapi.com/) is the 
>> most promising one I can find.
>>
>> Another alternative that I recently came across is a thing called 
>> ProtoLayer (www.protolayer.com), which seems to have been inspired by 
>> the DynAPI approach. It's not open source, but it is free for 
>> commercial use. I must confess that I haven't actually used it myself 
>> yet, but it looks interesting.
> 
> If you're in business, you have to do what you have to do, and use 
> whatever you get your hands on that can do what you want to do.  It 
> kills me that there are proprietary JavaScript libraries.  I remeber 
> being on the internet before there was JavaScript, and everyone was 
> happy to share their clever bits of code with everyone else.  It 
> surprises me that there are no other comparable GPL/LGPL JavaScript 
> libraries.  Maybe all the more reason that it's important to keep this 
> one going.
> 
> Leif
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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