[josm-dev] Difference between JOSM and JOSM-NG

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Gervase Markham wrote:
> By its very nature, it's impossible to tell how many more 

.. or less ..

> contributors
> there would be, and how much better 

.. or worse ..

> the code would be, if it was written
> more in line with standard Java best practice. But Petr and I are at
> least two data points.

And Imi and myself are probably people who get scared by it. It is 
totally moot to discuss "what if". We'd attract different people and it 
would be a different project. Some things would be better, some worse; 
some slower, some faster.

Now JOSM really isn't that big. And everything is Open Source. And Petr 
has made quite a good start with JOSM-NG. I'd hazard the guess that, if 
you want a clean implementation of JOSM's features, it would probably be 
*less* work to sit down with the code and copy or re-implement for 
JOSM-NG than it would be to completely change JOSM.

Why it hasn't been done yet, beats me.

And this situation is not new; JOSM-NG has been around for quite a while 
now and, as far as I am aware, while we hear occasional whining about 
how JOSM is badly designed and how people would love to help but cannot, 
nobody has actually taken the time to give JOSM-NG the push it needs to 
become a full-featured JOSM replacement. I'm sticking to JOSM myself 
because I like its structure more and because I feel that we JOSM 
developers have a certain responsibility vis-a-vis the JOSM users to 
maintain the software, but as soon as there is something that looks and 
feels more or less like JOSM but is better designed and faster, I won't 
hesitate for a second to tell everybody to switch.


I take the idea of changing code to be more attractive to potential 
programmers quite seriously. I have, for example, re-implemented the 
complete Osmarender XSLT code in Perl because I figured that this would 
attract more developers (anyone who has ever used trigonometry in XSLT 
will know why).

But with JOSM-NG sitting around untouched by anyone but Petr himself, 
and this for the best part of a year, the argument that a properly 
designed JOSM would attract more programmers rings hollow. What JOSM 
currently needs most is a few people who share the responsibility, who 
make JOSM "their" project and who are willing to do more than submit the 
occasional patch. It seems to me that JOSM-NG, despite its clean 
architecture and technical superiority which I don't doubt for a second, 
has not managed to find these people either.


Can we make it mandatory in the future for everyone whining about JOSM's 
programming model to explain why they're not working on JOSM-NG?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"