Faces Behind the Code: Struts Development

In his insightful essay on Open Source development, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric Raymond described two development styles:

• The Cathedral ” Development based on centralized control and management with careful planning of releases and tight control of the code.

• The Bazaar ” Loose control of development with a large number of people offering their own input and contributions. Each person adds value where they can. The end result is faster development and much quicker isolation and fixing of bugs .

Raymond identifies Linux as the first great bazaar-style development project. Linux development went much further and much faster than anything before it.

Although there's a core of developers behind Struts, the speed and quality features of bazaar-style development are definitely at work. In the short time that Struts has been available, its development and user acceptance has been amazing.

The Core Developers

There have been many contributions to Struts, but a few of the contributors really stand out:

• Craig McClanahan ” Craig was a contributor in the original Apache Jserv project, and then a core contributor to Tomcat. He was the original visionary behind Struts, one of its primary developers, and the chief architect of Struts as it stands today.

• Ted Husted ” Ted has been a Struts committer since December of 2000, and built an early production site that launched in June of 2001. His ongoing development and support for the project has been outstanding.

• James Holmes ” James is the author of the Struts Console, the previously mentioned application for managing Struts configuration files.

• Cedric Dumoulin ” Author of Tiles and contributor to a number of other areas in Struts.

And there are many more. By the way, it's not too late for you to get involved. Whether as a developer, tester, tech writer (or in some other way that only you can dream of), feel free to get involved! You'll be a better Struts developer and make the product better for it. For more info , see the site.