JForum 3.x Ideas

I discussed this with Ulf some, but wanted to present the ideas here as well.

Firstly, we should move the code to GitHub or GitLab, there appears to be a JForum organization on GitHub already. The reason behind this is because git is easier to work with and both have an issue tracker that we can make use of.

Secondly, for JForum 3.x, we should use Spring Boot. The reason for picking Spring Boot is because it integrates nicely with Hibernate, and it has thymeleaf support out of the box, although JSP can be used as well with spring boot meaning we wouldn't have to configure hibernate with configs manually, and we wouldn't have to bother with manual xml configurations, which also means we could easily release an uber jar that has tomcat built in.

Lastly, perhaps we should move the forums to the jforum.net domain? That could be a good idea, and we could also setup some type of extensions site: ex community.jforum.net and extensions.jforum.net

https://www.thymeleaf.org/doc/tutorials/3.0/usingthymeleaf.html#what-is-thymeleaf
https://spring.io/guides/gs/accessing-data-mysql/
https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#build-tool-plugins-maven-packaging

Intriguing proposal. Personally, I'm more interested in features than in the underlying technology, so a project that aims to rebuild everything from scratch with a new tech stack would appeal to me only if it was the basis for a major leap in functionality. Do you have any thoughts on that?

we should move the code to GitHub or GitLab, there appears to be a JForum organization on GitHub already. The reason behind this is because git is easier to work with and both have an issue tracker that we can make use of.

git would be nice, but so far it hasn't been important enough for anyone on the team to tackle. SF has an issue tracker as well, by the way (which is being used). The JForum 2 and 3 stuff on Github is obsolete; it's there merely for historical interest.

perhaps we should move the forums to the jforum.net domain? That could be a good idea, and we could also setup some type of extensions site: ex community.jforum.net and extensions.jforum.net

We do not have control of the jforum.net domain at this point. That might happen in the future, though.

Overall I have to say this is a major undertaking - so I'm curious who the "we" is you're talking about. Is it mainly you wanting to get involved, or are there other folks?

udittmer wrote:Intriguing proposal. Personally, I'm more interested in features than in the underlying technology, so a project that aims to rebuild everything from scratch with a new tech stack would appeal to me only if it was the basis for a major leap in functionality. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Ideally for 3.0, new features would be improvements to the theme system (more modern theme), and improvements to the extensions system. Spring Boot would allow us to implement more features faster than trying to wire everything up manually.

udittmer wrote:We do not have control of the jforum.net domain at this point. That might happen in the future, though.

I have a backorder placed for jforum.net, I have also reached out to the owner of it. Alternatively, we could use jforum.io

udittmer wrote:Overall I have to say this is a major undertaking - so I'm curious who the "we" is you're talking about. Is it mainly you wanting to get involved, or are there other folks?

Yes, it is mainly me.

XAOS-Eric wrote:I have a backorder placed for jforum.net, I have also reached out to the owner of it.

I consider swooping in and trying to get hold of the domain that has been associated with this project for more than a decade an unfriendly move. That's not the way to build momentum for your project.

udittmer wrote:I consider swooping in and trying to get hold of the domain that has been associated with this project for more than a decade an unfriendly move. That's not the way to build momentum for your project.

I have spoken with the owner of the domain about buying it previously before finding out about this fork and he wanted a lot for it, however, now that I know this fork exists I understand how that could be considered unfriendly and I have canceled the backorder. if I were to buy the domain or somehow get it, I would transfer it to one of you. That being said, if I were to get jforum.io, I would get it at Namecheap and set it up so you two could manage it.

udittmer wrote:git would be nice, but so far it hasn't been important enough for anyone on the team to tackle. SF has an issue tracker as well, by the way (which is being used). The JForum 2 and 3 stuff on Github is obsolete; it's there merely for historical interest.

I also took the time last night to move the source code to GitLab (https://gitlab.com/jforum/jforum), if you have an account on GitLab, I can add you to the organization. Now that it is there, if you are part of the git organization on GitHub (https://github.com/jforum), it will be easier for you to transfer the code with all the commit history if that is something you want to do.