Inception

Snowman Theater is placing its first FOSS project on SourceForge as of 2017-01-22. We've given ourselves a little bit of time to familiarize ourselves with this new environment before beating ourselves up over not looking snappy and not having all of the bells and whistles clanging and banging.

So, as for Ponder: why is it in alpha and beta? Well, it is a validation library, primarily, but the validation portion hasn't been written yet. However, all of its support code is also exposed as sub-libraries. The filter package is available for use outside of Ponder. So is the reference package. Since they're pretty much done, they're in beta. This leaves the project in a dual state until validation is done. Then it will exist as rough beta until all the kinks are worked out and it can finally have a release.

Our intention is to have this library available on maven central so that it can be accessed in the expected JEE way (whatever your build tool of choice). We're still working out how we want to do that, so give a bit of time.

When will it be in SVN? Soon. We're cleaning up a few things and then we'll release it to the world at large. Primary thing was an overall package name change (which is easy even if it touches a dozen files) and a name change (requries searching all the source files for the old name in comments and changing to the new name) a little harder. Those should be resolved before initial checkin to the SF hosted repo.

Tickets, blog and wiki? Yeah, we plan to use them. Especially the wiki. That should be a great place to show everyone how to use Ponder - at least by our use cases. The blog ... we're pretty confident that we'll never use the blog. Tickets, yes. They're a good way to organize things. We'll probably get tickets in place just to track our progress getting Ponder in place as wells as initial wiki content authorship. Still not using the blog.

Well, that's it for this non-blog entry. Hope it gives you a snapshot of where our snapshot is. It should definitely give you a taste of how serious we are, too.