Title: RE: just thinking out loud
Thread: just thinking out loud
Forum: Discussions
Conference: ColdBox
User: oscararevalo
Now for a more serious comment, I have a couple of observations regarding
attracting more people into the coldbox community.
For one, it seems to me
that there is a bit of fragmentation regarding the 'official' coldbox resources.
What I mean, is that you find some stuff on the blog and forums on Luis's site,
some more on the Google Groups page, other stuff is on the trac site, and the
actual page where everything should be, the www.coldboxframework.com site, is
barely more than just a collection of links to all these other places. I think
the framework needs to be a bit more consistent in this aspect, gather all the
resources into a single (and obvious place) so that newcomers don't have to go
around the net hunting down all the downloads, news, discussions and tutorials.
On the same token, to present a more mature image, the project as a whole needs
to be presented as something that stands on its own and detached of particular
individuals which might give an inconsistent signal for an open-source /
community project. (Luis I know this is your baby and don't kill me for saying
this, but you elected the open-source way and we all thank you for that)
A
second point in the topic of attracting more users, is that some people may be
overwhelmed by all the features of Coldbox, and instead of being amazed by
having the "swiss army knife" of frameworks, may shy away from it. And they
would have a valid point, remember that all these CF frameworks came from the
need of just providing a better structure to our applications since it was way
too easy to make messy code in CF, and for some people that's only what they
need, just some structure, some 'patterns' to guide their application
development. But when they come across a framework like Coldbox, they may feel
that it has way too much baggage with it and may end up rejecting it and at
best, just applying some of the ideas onto their own architectures. So, to avoid
this problem it would be a good option to have a "Coldbox Lite" or something
like that, something that just provides the basic architecture of your
application, something super lightweight, just a couple of files and series of
conventions to use. I think this may bring in a full group of developers that
are not really looking for the be-all end-all of frameworks.
And of course,
the free t-shirts.