Itch scratching and scratch frameworks¶

Joel Spolsky reviews a book about Chandler . I don't know if he's right, but the last time I looked at chandler they still seemed to be in the "early preview" stage. And I thought I've seen presentations on chandler's architecture on the last 4 europython conferences or so that I attended.

Anyway, I want to quote something from the end of his article:

The Chandler team also overestimated how much help they would get from volunteers. Open source doesn't quite work like that. It's really good at implementing copycat features, because there's a spec to work from: the implementation you're copying. It's really good at Itch Scratching features. I need a command line argument for EBCDIC, so I'll add it and send in the code. But when you have an app that doesn't do anything yet, nobody finds it itchy. They're not using it. So you don't get volunteers. Almost everyone on the Chandler dev team got paid.

That's one thing I noticed after I started instancemanager (see also some weblog entries). The first version was already pretty usable and a few people started to use it. And found a small thing lacking here and there. Something that lacks is an itch that needs scratching. And instancemanager provided a framework for hanging your personally-crafted itch-scratcher on :-)

Somehow it turned out to be a good place to attach all sorts of tiny helper scripts and handy additional functionality. The same with archgenxml, of course. It started out as a handy way to generate archetypes contenttypes, but at a certain moment somebody added a way to generate workflow with it. And then someone added CMFMember support. Lately Jean Jordaan added "remember" support. You can add little things here and there. Stuff like that turns a product into a small open source community.