Open-source KonaKart contribution: towards oscommerce++ model

[marcellosales]

Hello All,

I spent more than a year and half working with oscommerce and I was always frustrated  to be developing in PhP and most of the code being written by novice and unexperienced developers... Although the ideas of contributions were great, I had always to customize and sometimes fix some of them for our own requirements   . However, as this community seems to be more JAVA centric and focused, it seems like my dreams came true to see an osCommerce-like solution entirely written in Java technology  .. I was just googling again about oscommerce to help a friend of mine, who I was developing in php, and I found konakart  ... Since december 2006 when I stopped working with osCommerce, I was primarily focused on open-source java development using agile development... I truly believe that we could use open-source strategies and practices to repeat the same success osCommerce folks did, but this time using a more mature way of creating Distributed Software and our Contributions style entirely based on the same Java standards ...

1. Add a Project Management System such as CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Edition to monitor discussions, development code and releases; If there's no budget for that   , why not using GoogleCode   ? It offers from Subversion, Issue tracking system, etc...

2. Having a main Subversion repository for this solution somewhere contributers can write contributions  ... The model could be something related to the Eclipse plug-in architecture and we could try to specify a way to resolve conflicts of plug-ins that may use the same code-line (why not using diffs and identify interface methods, etc??)

3. Plug-ins or contributions would be made by creating a branch on Subversion and the responsible for that would have to create and publish the required documentation, artifacts to install, and conflicts resolution strategy if a given piece of code changes something from the user's current installation...

4. The community could vote on general features to be on the next releases, and konakart as a company would decide to have it on the next release or not... Maybe by vote from the community?

Is there a way to have this project in this development structure? What's the license with the distributed code?

I propose the open-source community to openly discuss about this (Maybe going to Kailua-Kona   , in the Big Island to have a beer, seeing girls in bikini  and surf)

Take care,
Marcello de Sales
San Francisco, CA

[john]

Hi Marcello,

(First of all - we had to edit your post because it seemed to have lost all the icons, I don't know why.  we didn't change any of the wording).

Thanks for the post and the good ideas.  Someone recently tried to get something going a bit like this on SourceForge (http://www.konakart.com/forum/index.php/topic,151.0.html) so I'm sure there would be others around who would support this initiative.

From our point of vew at KonaKart we would be pleased to help and encourage the community to set up this kind of distributed collaboration for the open source pieces of KonaKart.

Our model is that we want to maintain control over the central KonaKart engine and encourage developers to build against the APIs provided - just as we have done with the demo applications and our Admin App.

A lot of code is available as open source - the Struts actions, all the application JSPs, all of the payment, shipping and order total module code, the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) one-page checkout code, the OpenCms integration kit, etc.   In the next release there will be some new features that will allow "skins" to be applied to the application very easily.  These could certainly be candidates for community contributions that could come out of this initiative.  By the way, the open source code is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Whilst this means that we would not want to make the engine code available in the open community we would most certainly be responsive to community requests to extend the API in areas that were requried.

We believe that this model encourages a certain discipline of coding against a set of APIs which we believe should help in the future when new releases of the engine are provided with new features.  We seek to guarantee backwards compatibility so migrations to new versions should be painless.

Licence details are at http://www.konakart.com/documents/LICENSE.txt

Anyway, I wish you every success with this.  We would certainly be happy to publicise this on our web site and keep involved - especially in the cases where the community requires new features from the engine.

See you in Kailua-Kona      (I was there in October 1991 for the Ironman)

Regards,
John