They say that timing is everything. In this case, I would agree. The community has been relatively quiet for months. Then, Ben, Malte Sussdorff, and myself are holed up in Brussels when all of the action when down on the bboards. My mailbox gets slammed with 100 messages. And I can't answer them. How ironic.
I just stepped off a 10-hour flight & i'm a bit loopy, but i'd like to respond to what's going on at ArsDigita, and with the openacs, as best i can.
First, the future direction of aD. I think that the unease that many of you are feeling is due to a decreased degree of transparency with the development process at aD. That is, in ye olden days, philip, jin tracy, et al, would be constantly blabbing on the bboards, keeping you up to date with the latest ACS minutae. This is no longer the case; the majority of the developers working on ACS don't seem to post as frequently as the old-timers. This may be due to personal choice, or to the severe time constraints that they are under , or because of some other reason that i'm not aware of.
Regardless of the reason, it's clear to me that our current development plan isn't well-known to the community.
When i recover from my jet-lag coma, i'll post everything that I know about what's going on. My hope is that with a little clearer vision, everyone will feel reassured.
The OpenACS is a different matter. Ben & I spent a great deal of "quality time" together these past 5 days (ugh.. it was like being trapped in a sitcom, a blur of travel & wacky misadventures..)
At any rate, drawing on the meeting that we had with Don Baccus in cambridge earlier in the month, i think that we have a the beginnings of a plan for OpenACS 4.x.
Do not underestimate the importance of moving OpenACS to 4.x regardless of what ArsDigita does: the 4.x series has a "package manager" which will, for once and for all, allow people to _EASILY_ write discrete modules for the OpenACS without fear of them randomly breaking or being stepped on by other modules. This addition to the project will finally allow for rapid development of the OpenACS as a "platform".
Ben is meeting me in Atlanta tomorrow to discuss this stuff some more.
He will announce the OpenACS plan, and make another announcement, at the Atlanta Developer Event on wednesday.
I will go collapse now.
