April 25, 2005

Praise for SubversionSharp. Denis Gervalle, and Softec

I have been meaning to make a post to sing praises of joy for the development and availability of the SubversionSharp project via Denis Gervalle and his company Softec. I had decided to do this last Tuesday as Tuesdays generally tend to be the most active as far as visitors to this blog. But because of the preceding weeks "vacation" this didnt happen as planned. I wanted to ensure the maximum reach possible as I feel this to be an EXTREMELY important project in regards to the development of several of my own projects as well as a multitude of possibilities that exist that can easily be developed using Subversion as the underlying "content/data control engine". As such I decided to wait until today to send this out over the wire. I believe this project becomes all the more important with the current push towards a decentralized web that has been given what I consider to be a GIGANTIC boost via Adam Bosworth's keynote (Thursday morning, last week, MySQL users conferenc)e in which he specified the fact that Google is working towards a decentralized system in which they are no longer housing and serving up the content requested via search queries and instead providing services that (NOTE: From this point forward in this sentence I am assuming the rest as I don't think he specified exactly what services would be provided) will enable this decentralized system to stay connected and up to date with the rest of the decentralized web.

In fact it was the announcement as to the availability of a summary of this keynote to XML-DEV via Jonathon Robie that prompted my rush to announce my ChannelXML project which, in essence, embraces the ideals of a decentralized system, allowing the ability to gain access to both system and user created/hosted "content channels" which can contain any combination of XML feed references that (generally speaking, although there is no requirement as such) all rally around a specific theme such as what Edd Dumbill and Company has created with planet.xmlhack.com, syndicating the XML feeds from various XML hackers and commentators from around the web and allowing the ability to ping one source to gain updates from many related sources. In a world where there are over 4 million blogs and growing rapidly the benefits that come from someone like Edd who is able to locate quality bloggers on a given topic, in this case XML development, is enormous as it gives the rest of us a head start in locating the content we have interest in from commentators who are in one form or another qualfied to develop this content.

If my day continues as it has thus far (not one interuption that has caused a loss in focus and subsequently a loss in potential progress) I should have some screen shots of the project to send out for general viewing as well as make available the source repository such that the first group of developers who have have shown direct interest in involvement can access and checkout a copy to begin playing with such that we can begin to develop a community wide effort to create something that in various ways and formats will be useful to our own specific needs while at the same time developing potential modules that might be useful to a much more broad audience. I will make another post as soon as one, the other, or both of the above becomes available.

In the mean time I want to, once again, throw out a HUGE amount of thanks and praise to Denis and Softec for the development of the SubversionSharp project. I am among a very large base of C# developers who have had interest in a project like this but for various reasons have held off from starting one up due to the horror stories that have been passed around as to the complexity of such a development effort. Apparently Denis either didn't care or didn't know of the potential issues and therefore ignored the naysayers and simply developed the code and released the source for the rest of us to benefit from. I know that I am only one of many who are extremely grateful for his efforts, especially that in which he tackled what seems to be the possible source of the naysayers warnings, that of breaking open the CIL and making handcoded hacks to allow usage of this code base on top of both .NET and Mono CLI implementations. Its that type of effort, to bring a project into fruition regardless of the technical hurdles, that demands a HUGE amount of respect and applause for going the extra 150 miles to force the code base into submission. My hat goes off to you Denis! I think I can speak for many of us when I say thank you for all of your efforts from a community who has been eagerly awaiting this projects arrival. YOU ROCK!!! :D

I would encourage all of you, even if you don't have an interest is this particular project, to visit Softec and learn more about the projects they have developed and the services they provide. It seems obvious to me that if you are looking for a company who does whatever it takes to complete a project, no matter what might be in the way, then Denis Gervalle and Softec might just as well be that company.

Cheers Denis :)