Is the JPluck Project Dead?

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The maintainer/author of JPluck, Laurens M. Fridael, is no longer going to be adding code to the JPluck project, and it looks like he's giving up on it. Why? Read below for more details (copied from his announcement here):

January 07, 2004
State of JPluck...

The bad news: I will not develop JPluck beyond the 2.0.x branch.

There, I've said it.

Is this the end of JPluck? No. I will continue to add bugfixes and minor changes to the 2.0.x branch over the next few months. If someone wants to take over and develop JPluck further that's fine with me. Be aware that the code is a mess at this point. (Some of it is truly embarrassing.)

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm working on an offline web viewer due for release late spring/early summer. (I have another product in the pipeline due in March.) I think it's poor form to promote a commercial product (that is still vapourwave) on an open-source site, so e-mail me directly if you're curious about the details.

The desktop companion for this viewer will be written in Java. The GUI will use SWT (rather than Swing) for snappier performance and a better user experience. (SWT uses native UI components, while Swing handles the UI on its own.)

The file formats will be open and documented and I plan to open-source the desktop companion code so that others can add custom plug-ins and extensions. The goal is to create a "web collection engine" that can support any number of output formats. (One could, in fact, develop an extension that outputs Plucker documents.)

Thanks to everyone who sent a donation.

The code is out there (we hope), and someone can easily pick up development and continue the JPluck project, probably with a new name. Any takers want to be the new maintainer of a Java-based Plucker configuration tool?