Is Spring Roo a zombie project...

[delgad9]

Dear Rooists,

Since a while a been feeling that Spring Roo has lost the attention of the Spring decision-making people (SDMP)...

These are my takes on it...

1. Ben Alex left the project without any announcement to the Roo community long time ago.
2. OSGI a foundational component of Roo and other Spring products was annihilated.
3. There are tons of outstanding SR Jira tickets
4. Another Spring Roo major component has been cannibalized and turned into a new api called the Spring Shell
5. There is no presentation of Spring Roo in 2GX 2012

This is only a part of a longer list of "symptoms" about it.

It would be really critical to know the official position about SR and its existence in the larger Spring Framework agenda.

Thank you in advance
B. and escaping pods Roogards
jD @ http://pragmatikroo.blogspot.com

Note: No answering would be assumed as confirmation to the matter.

[Ben Alex]

Rest assured that Spring Roo is fine. The last Roo release was made on 28 May 2012, which was just two months ago. A large number of organisations have entered into Contributor Agreements for Roo, and we're seeing their contributions appearing in releases. It also has a huge active population of users as reported by Spring UAA and reflected by the release of a recent book.

With that out of the way, let me address the specific individual concerns raised:

Ben Alex left the project without any announcement to the Roo community long time ago.

During my engineering time at SpringSource and VMware I created Spring Security, Spring Roo (including its shell which is now the basis of Spring Shell), Spring UAA, and a new cloud project we have yet to release (but you can get a taste of via our job ads). Most engineers like to invent new things, and the departure of any one individual from a project when it's left in good hands is certainly not unusual or cause for alarm.

OSGI a foundational component of Roo and other Spring products was annihilated.

OSGi is a perfect technology for certain use cases and not so effective for others. In the case of a tool that needs to accept new modules while running (eg Eclipse, Roo), it's a perfect fit. VMware continues to invest in OSGi technologies such as Virgo, and you can read a blog from earlier this month on some of that work. OSGi is critical to Spring Tools Suite, Virgo, and Roo, so there are plenty of active projects built on OSGi even within the Spring group. Within the wider VMware, OSGi is used in countless products.

There are tons of outstanding SR Jira tickets

13% of all Roo tickets are currently "Open". Of these, only 13 are open bugs. 8 of these bugs were last updated in July, and the remainder in June. Contrast this against many open source projects which have hundreds or even thousands of open bugs that remain without updates for years at a time. A policy I always followed with Roo was "all bugs must be closed before each release", and this continues to be observed. None of those 13 bugs existed when 1.2.2 was released just two months ago.

Another Spring Roo major component has been cannibalized and turned into a new api called the Spring Shell

For years I've received requests from other projects both within VMware and externally to have access to the Roo shell. The relocation of this code out of Roo had my complete support. We have numerous technologies which want to build on the shell and it's simply good engineering practice to move common code into a more modular and usable location. There is also ample precedent for code moving between Spring projects (eg Spring Security's filter chain, Spring Web Service's OXM support etc).

There is no presentation of Spring Roo in 2GX 2012

Like many popular conferences we have received many session proposals and it takes time to carefully assess them. We received a large number of proposals related to Spring Roo and therefore expect there will be coverage at SpringOne.

I hope this addresses your concerns.

Best regards
Ben Alex

[delgad9]

Hello Ben,

I am grateful to you for taking the time on answering my questions....

Thank you in proving me wrong in all counts. These are great-great assurances that SR is alive and well established in Spring projects agenda.

B Roogards
jD @ http://pragmatikroo.blogspot.com/?view=timeslide

[dserodio]

I'm concerned about the fact that Roo addons discovery and installation seem to be broken for two months (first bug filed on 7/Jul/2012), and it doesn't seem to be a priority for Springsource to fix it.