Open source code

[Thomas Hallgren]

I mentioned earlier the advantages of maintaining the source in a
public place such as GitHub. At present, I maintain the web4j source
in a local git repository (hence the git references in my last three
postings) to keep track of the changes that I make.

If the master source was maintained at GitHub, my last three postings
would have arrived as "pull requests" instead which means that with a
click of a button, you could approve or reject them, comment on them,
bring them in partially, or perhaps bring them into a separate branch
for testing. Once accepted, the commits would show up as mine with a
reference to my account. That might seem insignificant but
acknowledgment is one important key in open source development.

You mention an upcoming new release "likely in June" will contain the
changes. That's great, but I need the changes more or less
immediately. Other users might need them too and other users might fix
bugs that I could benefit from right away. Waiting for a "big bang"
sort of thing to perhaps happen in June doesn't work very well in
situations where you have several users that want to collaborate on
the code. That approach is actually counter productive and has been
abandoned by all thriving open source projects that I know of.

I would very much like to see the web4j source out in the open (not
just as a static zip file) and I'm willing to help making it happen.

[John O'Hanley]

Yes. This seems like a good idea. I will look into git/github a bit more.  That might take a while, however. I'm not feeling well at the moment.

- John