[morph-developer] Morph proposal

[Matt B. <gud...@ya...>]

Morph's incubation proposal follows, sent here first
in an effort to gain the sponsorship of Jakarta, and
possibly to attract mentors as well.  :)  Thanks!

Morph defines a comprehensive API for performing
object-to-object conversions in
Java.

PROPOSAL


BACKGROUND/RATIONALE

  As information flows through an application, it
undergoes multiple transformations.  While the most
prevalent examples of this in the J2EE space are
well-known (e.g. HTTP request parameters to
domain/data transfer objects, DTOs to domain objects)
the overall problem space is characterized by the lack
of a simple, well-known, conveniently extensible
solution.  At least one JSR (295) describes such a
facility as a dependency.  Having identified the basic
commonalities among the best known application
operations requiring object conversion, Morph
consolidates these into a single API which, along with
various bundled implementation classes, seeks to
achieve the oft-repeated software development goal of
making "the simple things easy, and the hard things
possible" with regard to its problem domain.


CURRENT STATUS

Meritocracy:
  The Morph team is eager to invest more fully in the
meritocracy approach taken by the ASF.  To date,
however, Morph's development team has been accumulated
by a sort of "meritocracy-on-spec" approach:  Matt
Benson was originally given
commit rights solely on the basis of his ideas; only
later did his work vindicate that decision.  [If
sponsored by Jakarta:  This is a similar approach
to that taken in the Jakarta community:  a community
member simply announces his desire to work on a
component, then proceeds with the community's
blessing.]

Community:
  It is somewhat difficult to gauge the size of
Morph's community.  There have been modest but
consistent downloads of the project since its initial
prerelease:  these average 21/month over 28 months. 
The traffic on its user and developer lists is
similarly light, but several bug fixes and
enhancements have resulted from the input of Morph's
users.  An additional possible benefit of
Morph's joining the Apache community is that increased
cooperation with and buy-in from other ASF projects
may increase its user and/or developer communities.

Core Developers:
  Matt Sgarlata is Morph's founding architect and
developer.  He has been a member of the Jakarta and
Struts user communities for some years.  Matt Benson
is a member of the Apache Ant PMC and a Jakarta
committer, so is familiar with (and fond of) the
consensus and transparency encouraged in ASF
development.

Alignment:
  Morph currently contains interoperability code for
commons-beanutils, commons-chain, and Velocity. 
Because it is Morph's secondary purpose to provide
implementations of common conversions, code that
facilitates Morph's use with well-known libraries in
easily anticipated ways is considered in-scope.  As
has already been implied, it is expected that
citizenship at the ASF would facilitate cooperation
with existing projects to mutal benefit.  Finally,
precedent demonstrating the desirability of such a
project at Apache exists in the form of Jakarta
commons-convert (this component ultimately failed to
achieve maturity).  Morph's original design
specifications are actually the generic
subset of those drafted on the commons-dev mailing
list as a next-generation implementation of this
project.


KNOWN RISKS

Orphaned Products:
  The Morph developers are part of its user base. 
Object conversion may be relevant to any of various
components of a basic Java application.  The risk of
"itch cessation" is therefore minimized; Morph should
continue to be an applicable technology at low risk
for being abandoned by its developers.

Inexperience with Open Source:
  As previously indicated, one of the initial
committers has some years of experience as a committer
and PMC member at the ASF.  Additionally, Morph has
always been open-source software, with its evolution
being directly guided by user input and developer
consensus in similar fashion to other Apache projects.

Homogenous Developers:
  On the plus side, the initial committers are united
only by their common interest in Morph (and their
coincidental first names and middle initials).
However, both hail from the United States, and
acknowledge this as a less-than-optimal level of
diversity.  As Java Locale support is a key strength
of Morph's transformation API, wider geographical
dispersal would be a boon.  The inevitable input of
the ASF's diverse community could only be of positive
influence in this regard.

Reliance on Salaried Developers:
  The core developers use Morph in their own paid
development jobs, but are not paid to develop Morph
per se.  Withdrawal of support is not an issue from
this perspective.

No Ties to Other Apache Products:
  As described in the Alignment section, this library
already has ties to many Apache products. 
Additionally, Morph's codebase is already licensed
under the Apache Software License v2.0.

A Fascination with the Apache Brand:
  While "Apache" undeniably marks a project as a force
to be reckoned with, the Morph team is more impressed
by the ASF's organization, procedure, community,
transparency, and camaraderie than anything else. 
Morph's developers share a
high opinion of Apache software in general, and
believe that Morph is of sufficient quality and purity
that it simply "belongs" at the ASF.


DOCUMENTATION

  More information about Morph is available at
http://morph.sourceforge.net .


INITIAL SOURCE

  The initial code base is at
svn://development.spiderstrategies.com/morph .


EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES

  Mandatory runtime dependencies are:

  - Apache Jakarta commons-logging
  - Composite @ http://composite.sourceforge.net
(ASL2)

  Additionally Morph has the following compile-time
dependencies:

  - Apache Jakarta commons-beanutils
  - Apache Jakarta commons-chain
  - Apache Velocity
  - J2EE Servlet API
  - Spring Framework (ASL2)

  Finally, Morph's test bed currently relies on Apache
Jakarta commons-lang, and will soon include code that
depends on the public domain ANTLR 2 parser library.


REQUIRED RESOURCES

Mailing Lists:
  (Return to this subject after a sponsor is found)

Subversion Directory:
  (Return to this subject after a sponsor is found)

Issue Tracking:
  (Return to this subject after a sponsor is found)


INITIAL COMMITTERS

  - Matt Sgarlata (matthew DOT sgarlata DOT wh02 AT
wharton DOT upenn DOT edu)
  - Matt Benson (mbenson AT apache DOT org)


AFFILIATIONS

  Morph has no corporate affiliations.  Matt Sgarlata
is employed by Spider Strategies, who have graciously
agreed to host Morph's Subversion repository (due to
ongoing problems experienced with Sourceforge.net
infrastructure); this is the extent of the claim
Spider Strategies makes on the Morph project (i.e.
none).  The current source code correctly lists the
copyright holder as "the original author or authors." 
In case the intellectual property provenance is still
unclear (due to Spider Strategies' physical possession
of the code
repository), the company has indicated its willingness
to sign any required documentation indicating that it
holds no claims whatsoever over Morph, its source
code, or any related electronic information.


SPONSORS

Champion:  Niall Pemberton

Nominated Mentors:  TBD

Sponsoring Entity:  TBD


March 28, 2007



 
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