Growing the community
Now that 1.6.0.3 is out, let’s talk about the Prototype community.
A lot of people have been commenting on how quiet it’s been around here over the last few months. There are several reasons:
- We were quite busy with behind-the-scenes stuff. Moving to GitHub and Lighthouse was quite the task. As part of that migration we went through all the bugs on the old Rails Trac and were therefore left with a large backlog of bugs that we’d waited too long to address.
- We were quite busy with our day jobs. Only a couple of us are freelancers; the rest work full-time for software companies. And usually there are several people working on Prototype at any one time, but over the summer it’s rarely been more than one or two.
- In an effort to “catch up” with the accumulated tickets, we tried to stuff too much into a single bugfix release. We need to keep releases small and focused; trying to change too much at once tends to disorient us and our users. Once we realized we needed to scale back this release, it took a while to figure out which changes needed to stay and which needed to be reverted.
These aren’t excuses; they’re just explanations. As a team, we agree that we’ve got to prevent such a long release gap from happening again, and to keep an eye out for warning signs like the ones listed above.
This means, among other things, that we’re planning to move away from a “when it’s ready” release schedule. Instead, we’ll move toward one in which there are several releases per year; whatever is ready in time for a given release will go in, and whatever is not will have to wait. That applies to bug fixes and features alike. Eight months between releases just won’t work.
What you can do
Community outreach was one of the major goals of Prototype Developer Day. Many people are frustrated with the state of the Prototype community and would like to see some changes made. We’re in complete agreement.
Ideally, as an open-source community grows, those who want to help out gravitate toward specific roles. Those who can grok the source code write patches; those who are good at diagnosing problems file bug reports; those who can write clearly contribute documentation; and so on. We’d love to grow that “halo” around Prototype Core so that things can get done more quickly.
To be more specific, we would love help in any of these areas:
- Give support on the Prototype & scrip.aculous mailing list.
- File bugs in Lighthouse when you encounter errors or surprising behavior in Prototype.
- Write test cases or patches for existing bugs in Lighthouse.
- Discuss the direction of the library and its future on the Prototype Core mailing list.
- Propose new features and implement them.
- Write documentation wherever you feel we need more; submit it to Lighthouse as an enhancement.
- Suggest blog posts. (Or even write them!) Post to the Prototype Core list if you’re interested in doing this.
There are, of course, many other things one can do to help us out. But if you’re looking for a way to contribute and don’t have something specific in mind, we’d suggest doing one of these seven things.
What we can do
We know we need more help, but we also know we need to be better community curators. So here are some things we pledge to do better:
- We’ll beef up the Prototype web site so that it’s easier to get started with the framework, easier to find great resources like Scripteka and Prototype UI, and easier to find answers to common questions.
- We’ll give special attention to documentation tickets on Lighthouse so that our API docs don’t stay stale and thin.
- We’ll release on a more consistent schedule, as explained above.
- We’ll resume work on PDoc (inline documentation) and Sprockets (JS dependency management), spin-off projects that make Prototype more of a “platform.” They’ll be a boon to the Prototype ecosystem when they’re completed.
Finally: if you consider yourself to be good at planning and organizing an open-source project, then we’d love your input on how to grow our community. Our highest priority, however, is not to launch a new initiative or process; it’s to get more people doing the seven things listed above.
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Comments
Great.
This is good news guys! PrototypeJS is amazing and deserves a bigger community.
Where can we found more information on Sprockets?
@Jason: There isn’t any yet, sadly. It’s still quite preliminary, but we’ve got big plans.
Here’s my two cents, the community is lacking because it’s not accessible. I would love to see a phpbb board or similar put up. Just a place for like minded developers to shoot the wind about prototype js. I absolutely love this library, but there’s no place for me to ‘go’.
Patrick, what about the google group http://groups.google.com/group/prototype-scriptaculous ?
With regard to community, just want to plug the new Unofficial Prototype & script.aculo.us wiki at http://proto-scripty.wikidot.com. This is the outgrowth of several conversations in the discussion groups. The point of the unofficial wiki is for us in the community to do more for ourselves, rather than relying on Core to do things for us. The wiki has tips, how-tos, a FAQ, troubleshooting information, all sorts of things—and of course, whatever you bring!
Writing for the wiki is not a replacement for donating documentation to the project. The two should complement each other. Hopefully we’ll see some cross-fertilization as well.
Does this have anything to do with getting your ass whopped by jquery? just curious….
@AX: I don’t think anyone disagrees that jQuery does a much better job of fostering it’s community than we did so far. Thanks for the insightful remark nonetheless.
A Javascript/Prototype specific Jobs page would be fantastic.
@AX: We have been through that already. There are people who like jQuery but I think most of us just prefer working with Prototype. We are putting our thoughts on this blog in order to give useful feedback to the team. It’s not a war, it’s about java script beauty and beauty is subjective to culture, purpose and to dozens of other facts.
Yeah that was knee jerk response… I’m sorry. I do like prototype, but would like to see the footprint grow a little smaller. Scripteka is news to me and I will work to make use of it and submit code. Best of luck.
Where can we found the “tips and tutorials” on pdf or other docs?
Sounds good. The mailing list is fine. Still, we need link as it is there in adobe.com , “Developer Center” where others can post the way things could be done using prototype. At the earliest. I can do whatever help needed.
It would be nice to have an official minified/compressed release. I know how to do it myself , but there are some who don’t , the compress it the wrong way and finnaly get angry at prototype (happened at work , my boss turned to JQuery because of this)
Scripteka – Categorizes the files, searching through the scroll list is difficult. Also Hosting the files would be helpful since one site is down…
I agree, an official minified and/or compressed release would be helpful, and at the same time, quash one of the biggest knocks against prototype – its size.
In general though, its still a kick-ass library for sure.
Life in the JavaScript world has been so much less stressful since I found out about the Prototype library a few months back. I have tried jQuery, but personally I don’t like the syntax. For me, Prototype is a lot more intuitive.
Also I was reading an article/blog entry the other day which was explaining a bench test which was carried out on both Prototype and jQuery, and Prototype proved to be the fastest.
I like the idea of smaller more frequent releases. Also if a bug somehow is introduced into a new release it could be simpler to track down because fewer changes have been made since the former release.
Keep up the great work guys!
I have to say that I LOVE prototype. I’ve been working with JavaScript for years now (not well most of the time), and prototype was the first I used.
I now use either prototype or mootools, depending on what I’m doing. I wish prototype had a set of effects, with smooth transitions like mootools. I know scriptaculous is that outlet, but I don’t really care for what it has to offer.
Though, I have to say, Prototype is the most fun to use. I love it, and could not imagine coding without it. Many thanks to everyone involved in its history.
I have been using prototype now for some time, and have been rather pleased with it. However, I have to agree with Patrick, when he says that the community is not accessible. Yes, there is the google groups, but for casual visitor it is quite difficult source of information. Thus, I would also give my vote for a bulletin board / forum. I believe that with the forum it would be possible to organize the information to more accessible format. And, at least for me, it is much lower threshold to post to a forum than to post to a mailing list.
If the forum will be built, the biggest problem is, of course, how to easily change from mailing list to forum. For this, unfortunately, I have no good solution.
i come from China. i look Prototype 1.6.0. is very good. i as if wakening from a dream.
thank you
Viva los Prototype!
Perhaps a simple PayPal donation link to go to Prototype and be managed by Prototype Core. “Cash changes things”. Would help get alot of the above suggestions off the ground. Perhaps have someone excellent full-time on the project. Etc.
Re: a hosted version of Prototype, Google is doing a poor job here. I’ve tested it out and it’s broken in Safari and Firefox. Because they set “forever-headers” for caching, these kinds of mistakes are deadly. The Google Ajax Libraries Api site (when last I checked it out) was full of bad links, unrelated videos for Google Feeds Api, etc. It’s really half-assed. About as reliable as a monkey with his fist stuck in a peanut jar. And I WAS so excited at the time.
I’ve always admired how Apple get involved in the distribution of their software. They own the process from end to end. I think if we’re proud of Prototype we should at least have our own hosted version.
I’ll put a few pounds in – if someone can add the paypal link to the prototype home page.
To the Core Team – please feel free to flame this if necessary – I do not want to make things more complicated for you but
Someone up this chain suggested a forum as a ‘place to go’ so
At the risk of getting flamed I have created
http://prototype.l.makeforum.org/headlines/
check it out
(in terms of migrating from email it at least has a facility to connect to google groups as a news feed so anything new there should get added to the forum)
Actually on second thoughts – digging around there is already a forum – but it looks dead.
Skripteka (also mentioned above) seems to be very much alive so I think adding another forum is probably a bad idea. Oh well, was fun setting up and only took a few seconds.
I would still put money into Prototype via Paypal though.
This is really interesting