The last 6 days we (Ra-Ajax developers) have had equally many releases as there has been days(6), and only one of those releases was a "bug fix" release, the rest was purely feature releases...
That's quite a substantial number which should assure our users that Ra-Ajax is being seriously maintained, even though it's an LGPL project completely free for any commercial incentives (at least directly)
Another very important characteristic of these releases is that they have been very much driven by community members of us like Rekna and Amarpreet. This is because we who maintain Ra-Ajax believe strongly in that if we can please a handful of users, we will probaby also please "the great masses". So most of our focus is on pleasing our (currently few) users, not necessarily giving them exactly what they ask for, but at least somehow solve their problems...
Here's a list of (*some*) of the things we've done in these last 6 releases, one release for every day;
And *MANY* more...
These are far from all the features and bugs we've sorted out the last week, this is in fact just "the surface" of what we've done, and
this week has been slow! Both me and Kariem have been busy with consulting work on other (commercial) projects to pay the bills, so this week has seriously been *SLOW*...!
Ra-Ajax was started in one of the last days of June 2008, it was submitted to Google Code about a month later, we had our first release about the same time and we're now at release 0.7.2. According to our plan we'll probably reach "1.0" around Christmas. And we've got almost 30 controls and exactly 897 commits to the SVN, though I see Kariem did a new one only some few minutes ago, so this number will probably be way higher before you read this blog.
Ra-Ajax is 100% purely a
bazaar project (ref;
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond)
We believe in Bazaar development, being as open as possible and that by pleasing a handful of users we'll be able to please "the world". But more importantly than this is the fact that we're willing to *give-everything-to-Ra-Ajax* since we are strong believers in that
Silverlight sucks! And by delivering an Open Web, Open Source and *FREE* Ajax Framework for .Net developers we believe that we will be able to counter-attack the invasion on the Open Web technology that Silverlight really is all about...
But
we need you! Most of the stuff we've done these last 6 days have been user suggestions. We need users to use Ra-Ajax and submit change requests, bug reports and feature requests to us since this is what drives our development. So if you have something to say about Ra-Ajax we are more than happy to hear about it in our
Forums. Together we can stop this attack on the Open Web by enabling developers to create, deploy and run their .Net web applications using nothing more than HTML, JavaScript and CSS on all platforms ranging from Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, IE, iPhone, WindowsMobile, Symbian to probably "your cousin's toaster" - if it has a browser.
So this is my call to arms for .Net developers to fight against Silverlight and other evil ActiveX2.0 take over attempts by existing monopolists and Lock-In API vendors. The Open Web world needs you, we need you, the free world needs you, but most of all you need to
say no to ActiveX, stop using and promoting Silverlight and start using Ra-Ajax *TODAY*!Have a nice day in the FREE and Open Web world :)
Thomas Hansen