Questions about Community Projects

General Discussions
#1

I’ve been here for a little while, but I haven’t posted much at all in the past. I’ve got some questions regarding hosted projects.

  1. What definition of “open source” are you going by? The strict definition defined on the OSI site or a different definition?

  2. Are you looking for projects that have had solid proof of work beforehand, brand new proposals, or both?

  3. Are there any restrictions on projects that are already hosted somewhere else?

  4. Although there are many benefits, what are the best benefits of having a project hosted here?

#2

The only definition of “open source” everyone can agree on is that you can see the source code somewhere somehow. After that it degenerates into an argument about loads of rubbish usually. So nearly anything will do in reality.

As for restrictions on projects already hosted elsewhere - such projects are likely to be rejected because there’s really no point in reinventing the wheel. The notable exception is JOGL/JOAL which turned up all unexpectedly as LWJGL was in its ascendence.

The best benefits of hosting at java.net are the free CVS servers and presumably these are backed up regularly too. There are numerous fringe benefits too such as project blog pages and wikis.

BTW, I’m impressed by what you’re up to with JPlatformer. A nice little idea there!

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Personally, I find sourceforge.net better in most regards. The notable exceptions are that sf.net is famous for having bugs (and sometimes long downtime - weeks) with its CVS system (but then again I detest CVS so I’m not too bothered), and that your exposure is to “all people looking for free software and libraries” rather than “people looking for gaming softare and libs on this one particular Sun site”.

Perhaps in 10 years time the number of people browsing this Sun site will be very large, but since its small, not properly linked even from java.sun.com, and relatively unknown compared to sf.net you’ll probably find you get considerably less exposure from the site itself.

Of course, if this doesn’t matter to you then you might as well go with java.net.

I strongly advise making it 1.4.x compatible. Check out Retroweaver (co-incidentally an SF project: sf.net/projects/retroweaver I believe) to get this to work. There are an awful lot of us who won’t be upgrading to 5 any time soon, partly because there are almost no non-syntax advantages, partly because it’s extra hassle, partly because of fears over untested code … but mostly because there aren’t that many people using it and Sun has artificially made it non-backwards-executable, and we want people to be able to run our java apps; we don’t all buy-in to Sun’s Microsoft-esque approach of “force everyone to upgrade even when the advantages are minimal”.

#4

That, I suspect, would be considered as closed source by everyone except Microsoft (who are famous for having a license just like that and claiming it’s “open source” and then being pilloried by world + dog). I personally don’t have a problem with this.

Presumably you are looking into webstart for your distribution? It would be a bit depressing to see yet-another-proprietary-installer for java (although we all understand the pressures). I would have thought you could integrate webstart into your proprietary client, although I’ve never tried such integration, so YMMV.

One final thought: perhaps you’d like to make a module for integrating with the javagamesfactory (see sig). I could guarantee a particular CGI for you to HTTP POST to which would get any newly-created game autoamtically loaded onto JGF (and forced into a webstart, so you’d need to submit info including a list of libraries used by the game etc so that the JGF server can auto-build the webstart JNLP). You can get a glimpse of the new launch of JGF on : http://213.88.244.247/views/games

#5

Hey, Alien Flux seems to occupy all the top spots :wink:

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

[quote]Hey, Alien Flux seems to occupy all the top spots :wink:
[/quote]
There are some games with ridiculously long names (e.g. “Mr hopwit and the mysterious maze”) which I’m just going to refuse to display in full, since this would mean designing the layout around them, and it will look bad for almost all games, and only OK for a very small number. So, hopwit will be displayed as “Mr hopwit …” or similar.

So, I needed some text that was the length of a “reasonable” game-name. Something like 60% of titles are Alienflux’s length or less, and 90% are “missile command”'s length or less, so these are the two I’m using for layout / design.

The pains of web-design!

#7

Thanks for the input and comments guys. Nothing’s final at this point. I’ve been wavering back and forth between the “half open-source” deal you’ve noticed and real open source these past few months.

WebStart will be one mode of distribution of the adventures created using my project although I have not even started to think of the easiest, most painless way of integrating that. A good deal of the end users won’t know a thing about Java, so I have to take that into some consideration.

I forgot how to do this. How do I check for a user’s version of Java? Ideally, I hope to deal mostly with people who have 1.4.x, preferably 1.4.2.x, but in the past I’ve had a good number of oddballs with 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, MSVM, and gasp, no Java installed at all. :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

You could make it so that if you hover your mouse over any truncated names, the full name is displayed in a tooltip-like box . Using the tag with some CSS to change tweak the display to your liking would be one possible way.

Will.

#9

Nice. Except…“The abbr tag is not recognised in Internet Explorer.”

#10

That’s what webstart is for. Currently, they have to click once, on a “get java” button, to get java (automatically downloads correct version and installs it, user has to click through install wizard) - if they have it already, no need - and then click the game’s URL once, and webstart does everything automatically.

System properties…