I’ve blogged a couple of times about the state of the Xalan-J project at Apache. Recently I’ve been using Ohloh.net to track some other projects, in particular the committer activity. For Xalan, here is a graph that displays the Commits since when the project was created at Apache.
The graph is pretty self explanatory.
Other stats, can be found on the Xalan entry on Ohloh.net. For users considering using an open source project, you may want to check out Ohloh.net, as it can give you an idea of the overall health of the project, and whether it is actively being maintained.
You also have to factor in the maturity of the project… projects that are very mature tend to get less commits over time if they are just a small component.
True, but in the case of Xalan and particularly a processor that is focusing on XSLT, it didn’t advance when the specification advanced as well. Again it was also backed primarily by commercial interests, and when those commericial interests changed (i.e. Developing a commercial XSLT 2.0 processor and selling it), the open source development went down as well.
XSLT itself is not dead as a language or specification, infact XSLT 3.0 is under development, Xalan…it is currently dead, and stuck as XSLT 1.0.
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R.I.P.