Is OpenQabal dead?
A few emails have shown up in my inbox over the past month or two, which I've been sadly negligent in replying too. If you sent one of them, I will reply to you directly in short order, but I did want to post a quick update here. The question lately has been: "What's going on with OpenQabal? Is the project (dead|inactive|stalled|etc) or alive?" The short answer is, the project IS still alive. For some value of "alive" anyway. This project has not received much attention from me lately, for a variety of reasons. Late last year I was involved in a political campaign, and that bled over into the holiday season, and I basically said "I'll work on it after the beginning of the year." Then January came and went, and my passion for hacking code in my every spare hour got pushed aside for some other interests for a while. But at no point did I decide to drop this project, and I fully expect some work to resume shortly. Of course my life just keeps getting more complicated, as I'm currently in the middle of starting a new IT consulting and custom development shop: Fogbeam Labs. The bad news about that is, it takes time and cycles that I could be spending on OpenQabal. The good part is, if things work out well and I prove I can support myself consulting, I should (in theory) have more freedom to dedicate some time to OQ, unlike when I was doing the "40 hours a week for The Man" job. One point of interest though: The focus of OpenQabal might change. After a very enlightening discussion a few weeks ago - with a friend who's opinions I respect greatly - I'm thinking that OpenQabal should probably drop most of the directly user facing "stuff" (for now at least) and focus on become a set of enabling APIs for building social applications. Of course those APIs were always part of the plan, but what I was trying to build was the APIs and a default suite of applications to use them, all at the same time. And since this is still mostly a one-person project, it's proving somewhat overwhelming. So, the net-net is: OpenQabal is still alive, but the focus may be changing, and the roadmap along with it. And I can't make any specific promises at the moment about what will be done when. Unless you want to hire Fogbeam Labs to do some OpenQabal work, that is. :-) Also, to the couple of folks who have asked "I want to use OpenQabal in a production site, can I?" The answer is a qualified "maybe." The blogging and forums stuff works fairly well, since it's all based on existing code from established projects. And SSO between the Roller App and the JavaBB App using CAS works fairly well. The last thing I was looking into before things got stalled out was how to make CAS into an OpenID Relying Party so one could sign in using OpenID and still get SSO between apps. That may get dropped for now, once work resumes however.
[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ]