JBoss and Fuse has always been about developer focus. Whether you're someone who builds applications with our projects and products, or someone who contributes to the construction of those projects, or a combination of the two, over the years we've been pretty successful at appealing to the Java and JVM communities. With initiatives like JBoss Everywhere, acquisitions such as FuseSource or FeedHenry, we've constantly grown our developer footprint and appeal. How we reach those developers, educate them on what we're doing, how we need their help etc. has always been a multi-faceted effort with JBoss.org playing a central role. If you've been with us long enough then you'll remember that JBoss.org has had a number of personality changes, going from driving interest in JBossAS as a project and other commercial activities, through the introduction of JBoss.com and making JBoss.org a purely project oriented site with focus on our many upstream projects and JBoss Labs, and then back to a more product focus coinciding with our move to give developers free access to our products, and more recently once again adding in more community efforts.
In the past few years we introduced the Red Hat Developer Program which is meant to appeal to a wider community of developers than just JBoss or Fuse. The long term aim has always been to cater to contributor developers (those who help us build our projects) and user/builder developers (those who use our projects and products to build their own applications). Slowly but surely we have moved closer towards that plan and now we are at a point where we have to consider how JBoss.org and developers.redhat.com can work better together. If you hadn't noticed, much of the JBoss developer work had moved to the developer.jboss.org location, leaving the main www.jboss.org page to focus on products (of course there are exceptions, including the various microsites like our research or IoT pages). The eventual plan is to fold the JBoss developer content into appropriate pages within the main Red Hat developer site; that's going to take a while though due to the other services and sites which are hosted from that site. But for now the product-oriented pages need to move over to developers.redhat.com and we are left with a question of where does www.jboss.org point to? There are two obvious options:
- It points to developer.jboss.org and in essence returns www.jboss.org to the community focus it had a few years ago.
- It points to developers.redhat.com, giving www.jboss.org a feel closer to that which existed at the start of the JBoss adventure.
Throughout our history JBoss and Red Hat have had an enviable track record of looking for input from our wider communities on a wide range of things we are contemplating. For example, probably one of the biggest I can recall in recent years was the JBossAS rename. It's for that reason I'm writing this blog entry, to inform our communities that we're going to be making a change. I value your input and although I and the team have our own thoughts on the right answer, I don't want to just drop this on everyone without some consultation. After all, www.jboss.org is not a site used only by Red Hat employees! One easy way for us to determine is from tracking your usage and for that reason www.jboss.org will soon show two options and when you land on the homepage you'll be able to either go to developers.redhat.com and find information on product downloads, tutorials etc. or continue to developer.jboss.org and locate your favourite community project and associated information. Let's see how this works and then we'll report back after a meaningful period of time.
Onward!