Re: still an active project?

[Mario Fusco]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 11:16 AM, uwe schaefer <u...@thomas-daily.de> wrote:

hi mario

we use an almost unchanged fork of lambdaj in our projects. anyway, there does not seem to be a lot of activity on the project lately.

before depending on lambdaj irrevertibly, we like to know, if the project is still alive/maintained and what the roadmap for the project is.

anyway, we enjoy using it very much as it simplifies our code a great deal.

thanks, uwe

Hi Uwe,

first of all thanks for your interest in lambdaj.

As you noticed I didn't do much work on lambdaj in the last period, mainly because lots of things happened in my life in a few months: I moved back from Berlin to Milan (yes, probably not a good idea in this period :( ), my first daughter is born and I started a new job in Red Hat as core developer of the Drools rule engine so I have to learn lots of completely new things for me .

At the moment there isn't a clear roadmap for lambdaj because I cannot find any new interesting feature that I would like to add to the library. Do you have any suggestion about it? My only commitment is to close in the next weeks the bugs (few and mostly related with android that I don't know very well) still open in the project's issue tracker.

As for the question if lambdaj is still alive/maintained, let me be completely frank: I don't think your question makes much sense. As you know lambdaj is a one-man-effort (myself) so what will happen if I will reply: "don't worry, lambdaj is the only thing I do in my life and I am working on it nights and days", you will decide to "depend on lambdaj irreversibly" and a (sad) day I will have a fatal accident? Will all your projects be irreversibly screwed up?

My point is that lambdaj, like all the other thousands of big and small open source projects developed around the world, doesn't belong to me but to the whole developers community. Even the idea of using Hamcrest to iterate over collections doesn't belong to me: I "stole" it from this Hakan Raberg post back in 2007 http://ghettojedi.org/using_hamcrest_for_iterators/ and enriched it with other personal "inventions" like how to use proxies and reflection in order to make the DSL more fluent and readable. However Hakan's ideas, mine and the ones of all the people who gave their contributions to the project are now in the lambdaj source code and are freely available for everybody who wants just use them, learn something from them by reading how they have been implemented or even better improve or enrich them with new amazing ideas.

You wrote that you already have your fork of the project, so probably you already read a good part of its code and maybe did some small modifications to make it fits your needs. Even better possibly you had or will have other ideas to improve lambdaj, so why don't make them freely available as well and allow other developers to enjoy them? In the end let me answer your question with another question. Did you already give a look at the lambdaj source code? (it is not rocket science at all). Do you feel comfortable with it or at least do you understand the main concepts? If so, and if you find lambdaj useful for your needs, my advice is to stop worrying and go forward using it. If you have any question about lambdaj internals feel free to ask and I will try to clarify your doubts as soon as possible.

Thanks (and sorry for my small digression :) ),
Mario

[Uwe Schäfer]

On 06/15/2012 12:38 PM, Mario Fusco wrote:

Hi Mario

thanks a lot for your quick and honest answer. first of all, congrats on fatherhood and moving to RedHat. I can imagine being a redhat employee to be pretty nice because you get to work with a lot of bright minds and may have the chance to influence the industry as a whole.

At the moment there isn't a clear roadmap for lambdaj because I cannot find any new interesting feature that I would like to add to the library. Do you have any suggestion about it?

neither do i. lambdaj provides way more than i want, so i am not looking for additional features.

My only commitment is to close in the next weeks the bugs (few and mostly related with android that I don't know very well) still open in the project's issue tracker.

nice. this is what i am looking for. as we're on it, maybe you could integrate http://code.google.com/p/lambdaj/issues/detail?id=88 or send me a comment on what to do there.

As for the question if lambdaj is still alive/maintained, let me be completely frank: I don't think your question makes much sense. As you know lambdaj is a one-man-effort (myself) so what will happen if I will reply: "don't worry, lambdaj is the only thing I do in my life and I am working on it nights and days", you will decide to "depend on lambdaj irreversibly" and a (sad) day I will have a fatal accident? Will all your projects be irreversibly screwed up?

umm. no... i did not at all mean to come off as pushy, unkind or unthankful. the question for us is just: are we going to fork and shape it into what we need, or do we use it the way it is, in order not to loose upstream fixes.

i have been working on a OSS project once, that then got backing from a mayor company. this is why i asked for a roadmap.

You wrote that you already have your fork of the project, so probably you already read a good part of its code

not too much by now :)

and maybe did some small modifications to make it fits your needs. Even better possibly you had or will have other ideas to improve lambdaj, so why don't make them freely available as well and allow other developers to enjoy them?

if i changed lambdaj significantly, i would. i don't want to create unnecessary fragmentation though, hence the question.

If you have any question about lambdaj internals feel free to ask and I will try to clarify your doubts as soon as possible.

thank you very much! (i mean it)
i will make use of this offer sooner or later. probably through the issue-tracker first.

again thanks for your kind answer.
 uwe