Hi Dale,

Thanks!

Here are the answers to your questions.

1. Wiki, issue tracker; all fine by me. If github doesn't properly supply one, I'm ok with using sourceforge or something else. In essence, considering you're the just appointed documentation manager: if you think it's good, then we'll go for it.

2. Providing hosting: sure no problem we can host something. I already have the adapto.org domain and have it pointed to github at the moment.

3. Differences between ATK and Adapto. In short, I think the framework would be better if it can focus on what differentiates it. This means NOT focussing on anything that is already provided by common frameworks. So I would like to leave caching, view rendering, database connectivity etc. to an existing framework (Zend Framework) and have Adapto eventually just contain the code that makes it great. I also have ideas to extend the ui bit beyond just websites (think mobile/tablet apps).

Another point is that the codebase is quite complex and one reason for that is the 12 years of legacy. By starting fresh and not worrying so much initially about backwards compatibility, we can leave some of that baggage behind.

4. Achievo has always been a great showcase of atk capabilities and a playground to test new ATK features. However, the reason that worked is because I was an Achievo power user myself. I no longer use Achievo in my current company, so I would not be suitable for maintaining it. Perhaps Sandy (if he is still the maintainer of Achievo) is willing and able to upgrade Achievo to the new version of the framework.

Greetings,
Ivo

Hi Dale,

I like most things you mentioned with the exception of the mailing list. I follow many projects and I still prefer the forums over mailing lists for several reasons including:

1. The organizational structure of forums (ATK announcements, ATK Questions, ATK showcases)

2. Easy to view, follow and find activities. I personally get lots of emails during the day and keeping up with them could be a challenge. However when I come to this forum I can easily follow everything that's going on because it's very targeted.

3. Forum offers the ability to send email notifications is desired, allowing the user to only receive emails on those topics that he/she is really interested in. I use this feature a great deal on this forum.


Now if we consider something like Google Groups for Adapto, they may bring several avantages, with the exception of categorizing posts.

Hi Ivo,

I really like your vision of extending the UI beyond websites.

As previously mentioned, some candidates that may assist with this are:

Bootstrap by Twitter

JQuery as foundation library, which JQuery Mobile relies on.

I've been playing with these two and they seem to have great potential.

Kickstrap is also an up and coming enhancement to Bootstrap by Twitter, which offers more themes and widgets out of the box.

I really hope that you take some of this into consideration as you think about the future of Adapto.

I have created an Adapto project on SourceForge with a project blog, documentation (Wiki), support Forums and Mailing Lists, and release packages for download. See http://sourceforge.net/p/adapto/blog/.

My first experiences with creating a SourceForge project are generally positive, although:

1) the Wiki is not MediaWiki compatible. Perhaps I added the wrong Wiki type to the project, perhaps I needed to create a Classic project, or perhaps it just isn't anymore. Either way, importing content from my Community Achievo/ATK wiki may be more difficult than I thought (although I'm still investigating). Also, it doesn't seem possible to upload images to the Wiki (but it does support uploading file attachments).

2) SourceForge is operated by a U.S. company, which means access is blocked to Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria IP addresses (I also learned about encryption export controls, which after some research I don't believe apply - see my blog post http://www.dalescott.net/wordpress/?p=865).

Github and SourceForge both provide basic static HTML web pages and Wiki's, but Github does not provide Forums, Mailing Lists or Blogs, so if we want any of these features they will have to be hosted somewhere (if anyone other than me thinks Mailing Lists are a good idea, you better speak up!), and SourceForge seems as good a choice as any for a community project. However, I'm interested in your experiences with project hosting and opinions on the SourceForge project. I'd like to move fairly quickly if possible - it's not fair to iBuildings to be using their resources for discussing Adapto.

Dale

I to would prefer forums with optional email alerts for discussion rather than mailing lists

Based on Ivo's comments Adapto will not simply be an upgrade to ATK so should we have our own version of ATK with some updates applied to go with Dale's Wiki in the meantime ?

Wayne

I like forums more. It is easy to find some anwsers that aren't on the wiki. The wiki should help you gettting started and how to make your first module/ application. The mailing lists is not that usefull is guess but not sure about that.

Maybe I will update Achievo to the new framework. But I have to think about it because I have less time.

If I can help with Adapto in some way I would like to do that.

Nice work dale; let's move adapto specific communication over to sourceforge as soon as possible. Also I think we should link to sourceforge from github and vice versa, and maybe get a simple page up on adapto.org instead of just redirecting to github.

The main content on the github page is just the readme.md file in the repository, feel free to fork, adjust and submit a pull request and I'll incorporate your changes.

1) Adapto project documentation

I've switched the Adapto wiki to MediaWiki (although there's not much on it yet), and in the process found SourceForge can provide a phpBB forum (the same forum sw as this one). However, since the Adapto project is less than a week old and hasn't made a functional release yet, I decided that it's not time yet for a forum and the project would benefit more from the simplicity of a single mailing list.

I appreciate the arguments made by wayneh and jgarifuna, but decided the extra steps for viewers to access the forum just to read the message are steps that could impede development flow, and the mail archives can be browsed by thread at a viewer's convenience without needing to subscribe to the list (although I'll concede that phpBB has a superior user interface). If you do subscribe, but find the volume overwhelming, you can always set your mail client to move the mail out of your main mail folder so it's less distracting. Ivo has already subscribed to the adapto-developers mail list, so all Adapto communication should be done on adapto-developers@lists.sourceforge.net starting now. I'd like to revisit the value of a forum though once we've made a functional release.

Adapto mail archive: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=adapto-developers (for an example with a lot of mail, see the Inkscape mail archive: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=inkscape-devel )

I haven't figured out how to put up a static website yet on SourceForge for Adapto, but http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/adapto is a nice view of the project, with access to the MediaWiki and Blog from a toolbar (and I've added a link to the Github project). Perhaps for now adapto.org should resolve to here?

2) Achievo/ATK Community Wiki. Now that I've figured out how to create a SourceForge project with a MediaWiki wiki, I could create a new ATK Community project on SourceForge and move my "Community Wiki" to the SourceForge project. If iBuildings eventually wants to close the Achievo/ATK forum, I could also create a phpBB forum on SourceForge, and if iBuildings provided an export from their Achievo phpBB, it might be possible to import it into the SourceForge Achievo Community phpBB and no information would be lost. Any thoughts? Anyone been talking to iBuildings?

Dale

I have notified Ibuildings of the new effort and invited them to participate. I've received a response that they will consider it. I really hope they do. ATK wouldn't be where it was today if they hadn't adopted it in 2000 and probably vice versa.

I'm ok with using a mailing list until adapto is in a working state. ATK originally had a mailing list in the past. The main reason we switched to a forum is that it is way easier to use and search.

I've started moving my re-factored Achievo-ATK community wiki to SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/achievoatk/). The pages are all there, but there are problems with images I'm investigating (perhaps related to SourceForge's virtual hosting mechanism). If you want edit privileges to the SourceForge wiki, send me your SourceForge user ID either in the forum (perhaps start a new topic for SourceForge wiki signup), or by private message and I'll add you to the developer group. If anyone would like to volunteer to share wiki admin responsibilities, please also let me know. For now, I think the more the merrier.

SourceForge also has a lot more hosted apps available (bug tracking, web CMS, phpBB, basic blog and WordPress blogs, etc..) so if anyone has any ideas I don't mind adding them and you can show us what you have in mind.

Dale

Hi, Ivo! Hi, All!

Glad to see all of us here again! It was pleasure for me to take part in Achievo/ATK project. And I will be glad to take part in this new project and Future of ATK too.

Yury

P.S. And Welcome to Euro-2012 in Ukraine

Hi All,

I’m Tom Schenkenberg, co-founder of Ibuildings, and ultimately responsible for our silence of late concerning the development of ATK.

Together with Ivo, Ibuildings has contributed much over the past years to the ATK framework and Achievo projects. We’ve build fantastic applications using ATK and have enjoyed all the benefits of open source development. Open sourcing ATK/Achievo was one of the best decisions Ivo and I made, now a long time ago:) Some early adopters saw the genius of Ivo’s creation, a framework ahead of its time and extremely powerful.

But today, ATK has become a legacy framework. And we took the business decision to no longer participate in active development and stop using this framework for our commercial application development work. As a side effect, our role as open source maintainers also suffered. I think the mistake we made is that this simple business decision to stop using ATK should have been separate from our role and responsibilities as an open source project maintainer.

I’m excited to read that Ivo has plans to once again create a compelling and innovate open source framework as a modern replacement for ATK. Best of luck Ivo! We’ll be watching Adapto for sure, and see if and how we can contribute.

But back to ATK today:

First I’d like to offer my apologies to all ATK/Achievo community members for not acting upon our role as project maintainer. You’ve all shown tremendous good will and perseverance keeping ATK/Achievo alive. And in the spirit of true open source projects, the most active contributors should have the biggest voice. It’s clear that Ibuildings no longer holds any claim to be a leading maintainer of these projects.

With the announcement of Adapto being not a drop-in or compatible replacement, but rather a complete new project, the issue of ATK/Achievo project maintainership still remains.
I’d like to offer anything and everything belonging to ATK/Achievo to you guys, the true maintainers of these projects. I’m happy to hand over the servers/domains/applications/websites/repositories/etc. to the community. Please help me to get ATK/Achievo in the right hands and in the right place.

Thanks,
Tom

Great news Tom ! Thanks for the resonse

How do we move forward from here ?

Regards

Wayne

I think the first thing is for you all to decide how best to continue with the project.

For me personally it would be a great milestone to have a 'this-aint-legacy-but-production-quality-software'-minded team put out the next stable (maintenance) release of ATK, with all the fixes and postponed stuff in that release within say 2 or 3 months.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for responding.

Based on your experience, can you please specify the roles(team members) that would be needed to move forward with ATK?