John Q. Public
Saturday January 10th 2004 - 12:43:42

Is the JPluck Project Dead?

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?