Death of a good library

Well, it has been a while since I posted anything. Guess I have been extremely busy? Anyways, I am back!

This post however is not to talk about how I am doing, but rather to talk about a couple of libraries on Jakarta Commons – commons-email and commons-cli. I have used both these libraries on more than one occasions in my projects. Unfortunately, there is no-one to take care of these libraries at the moment.

Email is a nice little utility that wraps around Java Mail APIs, specially for users who only want to send the odd email from their applications, without the complexity (or power) of Java Mail. Email is in a better state of the two, with some good activity by Ben Speakmon spearheading some bug fixing and progressing towards a release. If things go well, we might see a new email release (primarily fixing some bugs) out in the next few months.

CLI provides nice utilities for handling command line inputs for any application requiring such functionality. Version 1.0 of CLI was released in late 2002, and that is more than a lifetime in software life-cycles. Looking at the Apache JIRA installation for the CLI Project, there are 35 open issues and 3 planned releases. With no interest, I fear CLI would drop into the chasm of being a dormant commons project. Possibly never to come out of dormancy. From personal experience, CLI is a very useful library with the ‘Apache Assurance’. Someone just has to give it a bit of time and effort. From what I have seen, the library is not too big. A dedicated push right now will get a release or two out.

Watching the Jakarta mailing lists, there are two interesting threads going on:
First, the preparation of the next Jakarta Board Report (this URL might change with time as the URL only points to the latest board report always – which is time sensitive). There were a bunch of projects (including CLI) marked for dormancy. Now they are marked as ‘inactive‘.
The second interesting thread on Jakarta general mailing list is talking about means to revive ‘inactive‘ libraries. See the thread at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=117113645112526.

It would be interesting to see what comes of these two libraries.

Coming to the end of the post, I see that the title does not exactly reflect the contents of the post (the post talks about two libraries :-)). But, what the … I am too lazy to change either now.