Monday 26th Feb to Friday 2nd March 2007 - Mark Newton
Objectives
Design content for the Contribute tab.
Design content for the main Project page.
Write a new site announcement.
In order to produce a clean design I started by looking at the infrastructure already in place for JBoss projects and the contribution process.
Existing Infrastructure
JBoss Labs is a project started by Damon Sicore in 2005 to provide a hosting infrastructure for the JBoss open source projects in order to facilitate development and community participation online.
The main wiki page explains the details and includes the following graphic showing an overview of the components:
The infrastructure layer is called JBoss Forge and represents a set of services that provide a hosting platform for the JBoss projects.
Again a picture illustrates how each of these services is implemented:
Implementation of JBoss Forge Services
Service | Implementation | |
|---|---|---|
CMS | ||
Portal | ||
RCS | ||
Forums | ||
Blog | ||
Wiki |
JSPWiki is included in the diagram as JBoss Wiki is based on JSPWiki. Additionally the MySQL database is used to store users and roles for correct operation of JBoss Portal.
As mentioned on the JBoss Forge page there are a number of other hosting platforms (sometimes referred to as "Forges") available for open source projects:
Indeed Sun Microsystems use CollabNet as the hosting infrastructure for all of their Java projects including Glassfish.
The services within a hosting platform can be broken down into the following categories:
A version handling system
A content management system
A groupware system (Communication tools)
A project management system
The table below shows how jboss.org currently compares to its 2 main competitors in the open source application server space:
Project | Version Handling | Content Management | Groupware | Project Management | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Subversion | CollabNet | CollabNet | CollabNet | ||
Subversion | Custom | Wiki, Mailing Lists | JIRA | ||
Subversion | Shotuko | Wiki, Mailing Lists, Forums, Blogs | JIRA |
The Project Management System
Currently JBoss AS, like Geronimo, uses JIRA as a project management system but this is not mentioned in the JBoss Forge wiki.
The reason for this appears to be that it is viewed as a separate system from JBoss Labs. Users are frequently given links to JIRA to allow them to search for issues and track release schedules via road maps. This approach works but the lack of integration feels unprofessional and disjointed. In order to compete effectively with Glassfish development that benefits from an integrated project management system in CollabNet and Geromino that also uses an unintegrated JIRA solution I propose to integrate the new jboss.org site closely with JIRA.
This will give one user experience when using jboss.org and will allow greater participation to take place in the community with ongoing development. Since JIRA provides Project Management, Issue Tracking and Bug Tracking functionality it is preferable to refer to it by these names rather than use the word JIRA. This is already done in fact in the left-hand side navigation panel on the current jboss.org site:
-
Nomenclature
It is important to keep our existing terminology rather than redefine it. For example we should still refer to JBoss Projects and JBoss Products.
-
Tasks
Contribution Portlets for Projects
Comments