Pushing towards 5.0.16

I've been steaming along towards the Tapestry 5.0.16 release. I've hit nearly all the major bugs and have also been implementing a number of irritating (but less important) fixes and improvements and working on some better documentation.

Tapestry 5 is a much better, faster, more powerful beast now than what I first envisioned over 2.5 years ago. There are aspects about Tapestry, connections between ideas, leveraging of concepts, and other things that I could not have predicated ahead of time. Building applications in T5, I always keep some attention on what's working well, and what could be improved (usually by making something automatic). Tapestry 5 is very, very concise.

Working at Formos for the last 11 months has given me the time and focus to work on Tapestry itself, as well as direct and indirect hands on experience to really know and understand the rough spots. Certainly, this has shown up as improved Ajax functionality, and a lot of other stuff under the covers.

I think some time next week we'll be drawing the line and starting a vote on 5.0.16. I fully expect to then vote it as the release candidate and, ultimately, the final release for 5.0.

Keep tuned the best is yet to come ... I have a lot of ideas for way to extend and improve Tapestry with out sacrificing backwards compatibility. I've made that claim before and I look forward to proving it valid.

An afternoon off from Tapestry

One thing about being an open source developer is that the concept of "time off" becomes somewhat vague. Working on stupid bugs and documentation is "grunge work" ... so that counts as "work" whereas creating a super-nifty new component or plugin is fun, and so that's play time. Either can happen during the week, or on the weekend.

Likewise, when I was vacationing in Paris it was play time ... except for the two clients^* I met there, which was work. Except it was fun talking with people about what they're doing in Tapestry, what they look forward to, etc.

So, it was purely fun Saturday to dust off my Mindstorms NXT kit, which was previously languishing underneath a bookshelf for nearly two years, and start actually using it. Merlyn has much more room at his house, so we put it all together there.

We had some fun building the basic robots and doing the simple visual programming, and I'm looking forward to doing quite a bit more. The point isn't that we accomplished anything amazing (we surely didn't), but that I was doing something besides Tapestry, which is healthy for me. Not a big deal for Merlyn, he's much better at separating his work-week coding from his weekend hacking.

^*Clients here means users of Tapestry, not (yet) clients of Formos.

Comic: Coding Appreciation

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Of course, since I work at home, I can live this out every single day.

Back from Europe

Just got back from Europe on Friday, and have been recovering from a nasty cold and jet lag. This week I'm prepping for another Tapestry 5 training session next week, in Denver. I'm also trying to nail down the remaining bugs standing in the way of a release candidate.