Dynamics Consortium - Extreme Dynamics
Mail sent on September, 5th 2006 by Thomas Hansen:
An: Thomas Hansen; Tom Greenwood Betreff: Dynamics Consortium - Extreme Dynamics Hi there, This is a follow up to the mail Tom Greenwood send out to some weeks ago trying to find out if there was any interest in forming a group to continually advance and improve Dynamics, beyond what is currently offered by Progress Software. We got a number of responses to this, both online on the PEG and directly offline. The volume of interest was maybe not as big as we would have liked, but we feel that it is enough to make a start with. We would like to try and extend this discussion with those of you who have shown a positive interest in the idea. Some of you receiving this mail may not have received the initial mailing, but may have discussed the idea with myself or Tom Greenwood. If you feel you are receiving this mail and shouldn't be, or are no longer interested in being involved, please let us know. We have decided to try and get things going by limiting the discussion and involvement to those who are genuinely interested, and once we have made some decisions on the how's, when's and whys, we can then discuss how and when to involve others. The reason for this is that we would like to get things off the ground as soon as possible and try to relatively quickly to get something usable out of the initial contributions and efforts. We feel that having something tangible, such as an initial release of an enhanced version of Dynamics will make moving forward and getting more involvement easier. If you comments to this approach, be it disagreement, suggestions, ideas, please let us know. The initial idea is to get some initial commitment and contributions from you to the creation of an initial "build" of Extreme Dynamics. (We also need to decide on a name for the "product" going forward and also decide on what to call the group.) Some of you have already mentioned that you have enhancements and tools that you would be willing to submit. If you are ready to so at this early stage, please feel free to do so at any time :-) We will collect these and get a discussion going on what is required to include your enhancements, fixes etc. into a build of Dynamics. Please include any relevant documentation, implementation descriptions, usage descriptions etc. that you may have. Please indicate if you are willing to be involved in the actual implementation work or you are simply submitting content. As some of us are happily using Roundtable for managing our Dynamics development efforts, we propose to start of with Roundtable and Dynamics environments for the version of Dynamics to support that contain standard Dynamics baselines. These will then be enhanced with the submissions we get, on a server we will provide access to soon. We plan on trying to provide a central Windows Terminal Server based development environment to work on. For those of you using Roundtable already, you will be able to receive builds from this / these repositories for simple and selective inclusion into your own environments based on the custom variant and partner site development methodology of RTB. For those not using Roundtable, you will still be able to get builds, but without the version info that a Roundtable partner site deployment provides. The reason for this choice is that we do not want to spend unnecessary time in setting up a system on other technologies that we are not currently using. I also have a set of pre-built environments for Roundtable and Dynamics that we can use as a starting point - getting an environment up and running in very little time. There will be some issues of licensing (Progress & RTB) for this development effort that need to be resolved. This is something we hope to approach PSC about to get license sponsorships. As has been earlier, this effort is not an alternative to Progress' version of Dynamics or the development efforts Progress are making. It is meant to be a supplement and a means for us to share experience and knowledge in increasing Dynamics functionality with features Progress have no plans to implement as well as using some of the best practices for including new core services and functionality, which Progress will not be including in the commercial Dynamics build. Instead they will be providing implementation White Papers on how to do this. Extreme Dynamics can be the means for members to include these things through a joint effort of implementing suggested / best practices. Some thoughts on objectives for the "Dynamics Consortium": - Assembling genuinely interested participants who can help in getting things started and making the initial first version of Extreme Dynamics. As the concept becomes more structured, decisions can be made on how to include other parties. - We would like to use Extreme Dynamics as a means of engaging Progress to continue to enhance and evolve Progress Dynamics. This is an important point, as this should not be seen as a replacement for Dynamics from Progress. This also means that the Extreme Dynamics builds will also be updated / maintained with updates from Progress. - Putting together a Road Map for the "product". How many versions to enhance and maintain, which features to implement and when we can expect them to be done etc. Part of the initial process if to gather the enhancements that are already out there and put together a plan for assimilating these into a build that members can make use of. So, to prevent this mail from getting much longer than it is already, please feel free to get back to us with your reactions and hopefully also contributions to get Extreme Dynamics off the ground. Contributions can also just be time to review and test work being done, help in setting up the necessary infrastructure (web site, development environment etc.) if you don't have time to work on coding If you are not interested in being involved, or need time to consider, let us know as well. I would like to ask you to reply and confirm your interest in being included in mailings about this in the future, before we make the recipient list public to those of you involved. Finally, I will be in Athens next week for PTW 2006. If any of you are interested in meeting to discuss this in more detail, or if you think we should set up a time for interested participants to meet in an open forum, let me know and I will try to make the necessary arrangements. Thank you for you attention. We look forward to working with you on trying to get this idea off the ground. Regards Thomas Hansen Technical and Services Director ___________________________________ appSolutions a|s Denmark Tel.: +45 98 90 49 16 Mobile : +45 20 16 19 29 E-mail : thomas@app-solutions.com & Tom Greenwood President Degama Systems Inc. GTA Progress Users Group Office 416-493-0059 x107 Mobile 416-347-7930 E-mail tomg@degama.com