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List:       quanta
Subject:    Re: [Quanta] quanta
From:       Eric Laffoon <sequitur () kde ! org>
Date:       2006-09-17 20:13:23
Message-ID: 200609171313.23284.sequitur () kde ! org
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On Sunday 17 September 2006 1:41 am, Onno Timmerman wrote:
> I was wondering:

Well that's bound to lead to trouble. ;-)
>
> How many developers are working on quanta.

We have had several developers doing a small amount of work off and on but by 
far our largest volunteer effort is Jens Herden. Andras Mantia does most of 
the coding. Michal Rudolf has done some but mostly works on Kommander. 
(Andras does a little with Kommander too.) My involvement is primarily in the 
form of design and direction oversight. I manage the project setting feature 
goals. I will be doing some coding in the coming weeks, but other than 
aKademy I rarely have time to code except in January and Februrary. I plan to 
code more if possible.

We have a number of people subscribed to the developer list. After years of 
managing the project and seeing how difficult it is to integrate new 
developers and manage a project I've come up with a new idea to facilitate 
this through the developer section of our web site. I'll be working on that 
at aKademy. The relatively few active developers should not be a major 
concern. The actual editor part is developed by the Kate team. The new 
framework is developed in conjunction with the KDevelop team. That's a dozen 
developers there. There are other places where we utilize object oriented 
programming, like KHTML for the preview. One issue right now is we seem to 
need a developer on VPL, but we have at least a few people working on 
integrating the KHTML back end so 1-2 part time developers would do it there.

> How fast is quanta making 
> progress?

Fast. Right now we're in process to integrate with KDevelop and move to KDE 4 
which is not a stable platform yet, but Jens and Andras have had a hacking 
session at Andras' place and we will all get to meet with the KDevelop team 
in a week in Dublin. Quanta is fairly mature and it will inherit a lot of 
mature features from KDevelop, like better handling of other languages like 
Javascript, Python and Ruby. It will also be able to use any plugin that 
KDevelop does and vice versa. 

> What will be new in Quanta 4 ? 

I'm not really going to answer that in depth. I think after aKademy we can 
better answer as so far as I know we don't even have a date for KDE 4. It's 
just barely become somewhat stable enough to build and test and it's by no 
means feature locked. I will offer a short list...
1) Completion and enhancement of Team development features 
2) SVN support (from KDevelop)
3) core improvements
4) hopefully finally my implementation of Object templates, though much of 
this will be done using Kommander

There's going to be a lot more. It's just at this time we haven't got a handle 
on the full list and I hope that as a team we come up with a lot more 
creative ideas that are radical, inspired and exciting... Of course on top of 
our existing mature architecture.
>
> How many proffesional users does quanta have.

I hope to answer this through some functionality I plan to add to the site to 
register users offering enhanced benefits to registered users. One can 
consider that professional users would be contract developers, professionals 
maintaining commercial sites and small business people like myself (who used 
to be a contract programmer) and as a whole we make up some percentage of 
total users. My guess is most users fall into this category. Back in 2001 
when we were not yet part of KDE we were on sourceforge. This was at the end 
of KDE 1 and into KDE 2. We Joined KDE in early KDE 3. In the early 
sourceforge days we ranked as high as number 5 in 50,000 projects at the time 
in activity. We saw source downloads in excess of 30,000 per release. I 
suspect that somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 25 users will even consider 
building from source, so before we were part of the official KDE packages we 
probably had over a quarter million users. This was when we were little more 
than an HTML editor with a preview and tag dialogs. Fast forward with 
exposure to millions of users in KDE and the large growth the Linux desktop 
has seen and it's difficult to say we would not have at least a few million 
users. 

All I'm really sure of is if every professional user of Quanta were to kick in 
what he spends on lunch on a good day once a year we would have several more 
full time developers working on VPL, advanced XML, Flash/SVG tools and more. 
Right now we have around two dozen people who have taken on sponsorship from 
a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month. I would love to have 1% of 
our professional users assume a small sponsorship role. Quanta is so complex 
right now it's very difficult to get casual part time programmers productive, 
though I will try with anyone who volunteers. It's just a lot easier to find 
someone living where the cost of living is a fraction what it is in the US 
and Western Europe and for what a half dozen of us spend on fully loaded 
monthly TV packages on satellite or cable sponsors a dedicated and talented 
developer full time. I've got developers telling me to let them know when I 
can sponsor them. I just don't have enough people who think it's worth paying 
for free software. I guess they're more into free as in beer because they 
would be hard pressed to find a better development package for $500.
>
> Could there be a comparing chart between
> Quanta, Eclipse, Textmate, phpEdit etc...
>
> Onno
>
By all means feel free to make one and send it in. IIRC Eclipse uses a lot of 
Java and most of our users prefer native programs. Comparing to Eclipse is 
difficult because it's so diverse, but in that regard they seem way ahead if 
you do Java and I have been told we are better for PHP. Still they have 
massive development resources. I'm not familiar with Textmate. phpEdit is the 
package with Apache and Mysql installed that uses the debugger developed by 
the Russian guy, right? That has really no advantage to speak of other than 
having all those things working out of the box, but it's a huge download. 
Another one to compare is the Zend offering, which I'm told we are better 
than in many ways but lack a little.

Our focus has been PHP and XML and in that regard it's very difficult to find 
another tool that can even stand up next to us. My personal focus is 
efficient interface design and powerful professional level features. We 
already smoke Dreamweaver in most areas, falling behind only in visual design 
maturity and some small things they have done. By KDE 4 we will have hands 
down the ultimate team development features. We already have the ability to 
emulate nearly any other tool with Project Event Actions. By integrating more 
functionality and KStuff we will make integration with inferior tools more 
seamless in package downloads. 

If we can release Object Templates we will offer the first new development 
paradigm in web design since the now lame and barely usable WYSIWYG. Instead 
of visually designing one page with extremely limited HTML hacks for PHP 
includes passing as object reuse you would be able to visualize your entire 
site and manipulate your defined elements, styles, content, etc... by defined 
set logic and you would be able to define rules for interaction to be carried 
out by your base file mediator... In simple terms you would be relieved of 
the massive amount of drudge work and be able to manipulate objects on a 
conceptual level triggering a rebuild of your site. All this would be gained 
through innovative changes in work flow and just doing your normal work over 
time creating your objects as a side benefit and without substantial front 
end time investment. Nobody has anything like this... that is without 
subscribing to their world view on how to organize and create objects. This 
will be the first attempt I know of to create powerful templating management 
according to your world view and with just a little nudge or our best seeding 
of frameworks, as well as the ability to share frameworks and tools among our 
entire user base.

In short, I don't think there is anything like Quanta and by KDE 4 if I have 
anything to say about it you will be able to show your friends and tell them 
they are just crazy and working too hard if they are not using it. ;-)
-- 
Eric Laffoon - Quanta+ Team Leader 
http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
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