Infrequently Noted

So after receiving a keyboard-lashing from myself and others regarding some comments he made, Chris has walked a lot of it back and bravely noted where his new perspective conflicts with the old. It takes guts to do that.

My original comments were born of my frustration the internecine strife that seems to follow every discussion about OSS licensing. It's one of the reasons that I was so grateful for Dion's 100-point scale for judging community because it helps put all of this stuff into a perspective that lets you evaluate what's more likely to be good for a broad audience from what's more likely to hurt people along the way. There will always be both individual and corporate involvement in OSS, and both are good things, but neither are unalloyed forces for lightness and right. They've got down-sides. OSS communities and hackers should be honest about them and evaluate them on the merits and likely outcomes. It took me a long time to come to that perspective and it's and one that I'm happy to see Chris weighing. Kudos to him for taking it in stride.

Correction: I wrongly attributed the 100-point scale to Ben instead of Dion. Totally n00b mistake. My apologies.

Early on in discussions with the excellent folks at Zend, one of the possibilities that made everyone in the room excited was the ability to use server-side smarts about client-side work to automate performance optimizations in ZF apps. After lots of great work on getting Dojo integrated, Zend Framework is making that a reality by support automated custom builds in ZF 1.9.0's preview release.

What does this buy you? You get to use the Zend helpers for Dojo as you normally would, simplifying how you pull in code, declare components, and build your UI. What this new integration saves you is the tedium of figuring out which components you're using everywhere, building a layer file for it, kicking off a build, and remembering to re-visit the layer definition when you project adds or removes modules. Hopefully ZF 1.9 should lower the barrier to taking advantage of the full range of Dojo-based optimizations, making it easier to prototype quickly and deploy easily. Exciting stuff!