Apache Abdera is a nifty little project that is undergoing incubation at the ASF and that I’ve been using for a couple of projects since last May. As with all good Open Source projects, you start with some not-so-good code and you gather around it a community of people interested in contributing to make it better and adapt it to their needs.
This is exactly what happened to me: Even though Abdera’s code was already usable by the time it was donated to Apache, I started interacting on the mailing lists, sending in patches and even speaking about it at conferences.
Since my code contributions were fairly small, I didn’t expect to be invited to be a committer very soon, but this is what just happened. Of course, I gladly accepted and can now boast committership in two Apache projects, the other being Cocoon, which I have been following only from a bit of a distance only. Not using Cocoon for work projects makes it difficult to be active in it, considering the number of revolutionary changes that the code base is undergoing right now. I am happy to report, anyway, that we are thinking of doing a new major release by the end of the year, with better block management, Spring as a container and a new Maven2 build. Adding more manageability seems to be the key here, and I really hope this release is going to revitalize Cocoon and boost its acceptance.
0 Responses to “I’m an Apache Abdera committer”