What I want to draw attention to here is a key point in the conclusion of his Inversion of Control Containers review:
"In particular, I salute Howard for resisting attempts to twist HiveMind into something it's not - a rare quality, particularly in open source. HiveMind does (mostly :-) ) one thing and does it well."
Mike comments that PicoContainer looks like it followed the XP YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) principle and each new release seems to have haphazardly added those features which - guess what? - you did need them after all. He also comments that "Spring's just a bit took kitchen-sinky for me."
My point? Frameworks work best when they are cohesive, focused. That usually means tightly-controlled rather than being open source free-for-alls and it also usually means that the creator(s) started with a coherent vision of the whole.
So, when you're asking for Fusebox or Mach II to be opened up so y'all can contribute code, think about Mike's comments on why some frameworks work better than others.
The same invalid argument I found in other blog entries, when some blogger tried to compare Mach-II with Spring, where the comparison should have been made between Mach-II and Spring MVC.
Next time when someone like to made arguments, make sure they pick the right targets and the right focus.
That's exactly my point in making this post. A framework needs to be very focused and very clear about its target usage.
The confusion arises merely because developers tend to compare Spring with other IOC containers and hence make Spring seems nothing more than another IOC container. It's an application framework that Spring is shooting at not merely an IOC container, so what's not so "incorrect" about it.
CFMX now provides communication channel outside of traditional HTTP by way of event gateway, so is CFMX going "out of bound" too?
Sites like tigris and sourceforge provide a ready-built environment to support open development that can be as tight or loose as the project mainteners desire. And IMHO, active projects at those sites gain an immediate measure of credibility that is *very* useful in introducing others to the technology -- just having a download site that could routinely be counted on for Fusebox/MachII would be a great improvement.
The sourceforge site for PHP FB4 didn't result in an OSS free-for-all (in fact, I understand it basically just provided a CVS tree since no one was really helping out/contributing to the original PHP team). Fortunately, things are *slowly* changing (eg apparently Team Fusebox has CVS -- yay!) but boy wouldn't it be easier just to let someone else take care of the fundamentals (bug tracker, forums, distribution/mirroring, etc) and make the project look more professional?
