Proposal for new sub-project Tobago (of MyFaces) 18th August 2005, the Tobago Team (contributions by: Udo Schnurpfeil, Volker Weber, Philippe Hennes, Arvid Hülsebus, Bernd Bohmann, Detlef Bartetzko) (0) Rational The goal of Tobago is to provide the community with a well designed set of user interface components based on JSF and run on MyFaces. Tobago is more than just a tag library. The following statements characterize Tobago and make it different from other frameworks: The focus of Tobago is to create business applications without the need for HTML design. The development of Tobago pages follows more the development of conventional user interfaces than the creation of web pages. The UI components are abstracted from HTML and any layout information that does not belong to the general page structure. The final output format is determined by the client/user-agent. A theming mechanism makes it easy to change the look and feel and to provide special implementations for certain browsers. A fallback solution ensures that as much code is reused for new themes as possible. A layout manager is used to arrange the components automatically. This means, no manual layouting with HTML tables or other constructs is needed. A life demo can be found here: http://tobago.atanion.net The development of Tobago started in 2002. (0.1) Criteria Meritocracy The Tobago project will be meritocratic. The project will therefore follow the guidelines of the Apache Foundation. We use defined roles and responsibilities like contributors and commiters. We believe in teamwork and in the consens brought by discussions that are done on a mailing list. Votings will establish the final 'will' of the community. Community We believe that Tobago will attract a stable community sufficient in size. All MyFaces users/developers are potential Tobago users/developers. Tobago will make MyFaces even more attractive. Core Developers: Tobago was mainly developed by six employees of Atanion while working (if applicable) and in spare time. However, at the moment two of them could be counted as real experts or core developers and the others have a good knowledge of the project. All developers will file the Contribution License Agreement. Atanion GmbH will file the Corporate Contribution License Agreement. Two PMC members from the MyFaces project also want to become Tobago committers: Martin Marinschek and Matthias Wessendorf (both PMCs Myfaces). Alignment: Tobago is a framework built on top of JSF and therefore works well with MyFaces. The project makes use of several Apache libraries like Commons, Taglibs and Ant. (0.2) Warning signs Orphaned products: All active developers would like to become Tobago Committers or PMC members and plan to remain active in the project. Inexperience with open source: The current Tobago developers have experience with open source projects. However in the past this was restricted by using open source projects and participating on there mailing lists. No active development was done. Martin Marinschek and Matthias Wessendorf do have a lot of experience with open source. Homogenous developers: From scratch the project will start with six developers of one company and two additional developers from other companies. We hope to attract more individual developers soon. Reliance on salaried developers: Tobago was developed in working and spare time and does not rely on salaried developers. However Atanion will support the project in the future by dedicating 'work time' to Tobago. No ties to other Apache products: Tobago makes excessive use of serveral components of the Jakarta Commons. It is developed on the Tomcat JSP/Servlet container. (However it runs also on other containers.) Tobago is the ideal addition for MyFaces. A fascination with the Apache brand: We respect and admire the work done by the Apache Foundation. Various open source projects of the foundation have saved us an almost unlimited amount of development time or money in case of not using commercial products. We want to give something back to the community and become part of it. (1) Scope of subprojects As mentioned above Tobago is the ideal addition for MyFaces. Therefore we prefer to become a subproject of MyFaces. (2) Initial source The source code can be found under: http://www.atanion.net/repos/asf/tobago/trunk/ The source code is provided under the Apache License, version 2.0. A precompiled WAR for the demo can be found at: http://www.atanion.com/tobago/tobago-example-demo.war (3) ASF resource to be created (3.1) Mailling-list At the moment the existing mailing lists of the MyFaces project should be sufficient to discuss and announce Tobago topics. If not, we need the following lists: * tobago-dev * tobago-user * tobago-pmc (3.2) Subversion A subversion repository with one module 'incubator-tobago'. (3.3) Issue tracking At the moment the MyFaces JIRA module could be used. (4) initial set of committers (4.1) Already ASF committers * Martin Marinschek, martin.marinschek@gmail.com (PMC MyFaces) * Matthias Wessendorf, mwessendorf@gmail.com (PMC MyFaces) (4.2) Other committers * Udo Schnurpfeil, udo@schnurpfeil.de * Volker Weber, asf@weber-oldenburg.de * Philippe Hennes, philippe.hennes@philstar.de * Arvid Hülsebus, idus@krelon.com * Bernd Bohmann, bernd.bohmann@atanion.com * Detlef Bartetzko, detlef.bartetzko@atanion.com (5) Apache sponsoring individuals Tobago is sponsored by MyFaces. Mentors are Martin Marinschek and Matthias Wessendorf from the MyFaces project (both PMCs). Champion is potentially Manfred Geiler (MyFaces PMC Chair), if an official (and not a member) of the ASF can be champion.