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[nebula-dev] Future of Nebula

Dear People,

After a good year of serving as co-lead of Nebula it is time to reflect upon the status and future of the project. When I joined as co-lead there were a number of things that I wanted to help with.

* make the project easier to consume
* fix the build and continuous release
* promote Nebula out of incubation
* solicit for new widgets
* help widget authors to get on board as quickly as possible
* design a logo ;)
* Fix the Nebula example perspective

I think we managed to do this. Thanks again to everyone involved.

There are some things that are not fixed.

* the website 
* build the internal community
* build the external community
* ...

Especially the building of the internal and external community is something that is hard to get going. The internal community is you, the widget author and the contributors subscribing to this list.

My analysis for this is the following:

> Widget authors are pretty much individualists. We have many widgets and many authors but there is not sense of a "one product" like you would have for other projects. Every widget is more or less self sustained. Hence there is no "us".

> Most widgets are feature complete. They have a described function and there is no reason to evolve this from year to year.

> Widget authors have to move on. A widget is not ones live work.

> Feedback from the external community (consumers). I hear of many people consuming Nebula widgets, but there is not a desire or need to provide feedback apart from the occasional bug request.

Conclusion: Having these thoughts, I think we are better of being as we were, a perpetual incubation project. 

I am still soliciting around the web for SWT widget authors to join the Nebula project and we are speaking to two new sets of widgets [1][2].

I was also thinking to broaden the scope of Nebula and make it a home for widgets of other technologies like Swing, JFace, RAP and _javascript_. 

So please speak your mind about Nebula. I like to know how you feel. 

Do you agree or disagree with my analysis?
Move back to incubation?
What would you improve in Nebula?
Do you think the project is still relevant?
What do you think about adding other technologies besides SWT?

Cheers,

Wim


 



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