Ask HN: Anyone Interested in Taking over Jsweet.org?

58 points by renaudpawlak 2 years ago | 16 comments

Hello HN community. JSweet.org creator/maintainer here. Being an individual and having other projects right now, I don't have much time to maintain JSweet anymore. I am looking for an organisation that would be interested in taking over the maintenance and / or ownership. Would anyone have an idea or connection to introduce? I would be grateful for any suggestion.

iterminate 2 years ago |

A bunch of people will come out of the woodwork drawn to the idea of being able to immediately walk into managing a popular project, but it'll end poorly. If your project has outgrown you, or you've outgrown your project, then you can either shut it down gracefully or transition into community ownership (by finding people who have a demonstrable pre-existing interest in the project itself and allowing them to take over).

Shutting the project down gracefully doesn't mean it has to end, and it doesn't mean failure: shutting down the project gives invested community members the chance to fork it and demonstrate that they want to put the work in to run a natural successor to your project, and people will naturally gravitate towards the best fork over time. Afterall, without people with a vision leading it, it's just code.

Handing over ownership feels cleanest but it's rarely the best outcome (unless you're handing it over to a natural successor).

franga2000 2 years ago | |

They're explicitly looking for an organisation, not individuals, which should filter out most of this.

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | | |

Yes indeed

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | |

Shutting down the projet and/or change the OS license to make it easier to fork is a potential option. However, I think it's worth asking if some organisation could be interested first. I believe JSweet could be more helpful if it was backed by some org that would have a use case of JSweet and maintain it for it's own purpose.

mtmail 2 years ago |

clickable link: https://www.jsweet.org/ - A transpiler from Java to TypeScript/JavaScript

karmakaze 2 years ago | |

I can see the value if working with js, less so with ts. I'd done some work with GWT in the past and the Java -> js part worked great. A problem I can see when working with ts is not having the ts libraries imported into Java's types.

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | | |

JSweet comes with a TS definition files to Java translator (.d.ts to .java). So when you have the TS definition file, you can generate the correspond Java API on-the-fly or use a pre-translated/pre-compiled definition in so-called "candies". The candies are just here for typing in Java and ensure that you have the exact same API as in TS. Then JSweet generates intermediate TS code, which is compiled against the original TS definition. This 2-step transpilation process ensures that the generated code is correct and well-typed. In the end, you can work either directly with the JS code or the TS code depending on what you need.

jonS90 2 years ago |

I used jsweet to accomplish something really cool once, bringing pieces of an archaic, tried-and-true java codebase into the browser. I had to downgrade java to accomplish it, and I had to manually fiddle with the outputted typescript, but I'm overall very grateful for JSweet (and my users would be too if they only knew). I hope there's a future for it.

david422 2 years ago |

Hi Renaud,

Just wanted to say thank you for creating and support jsweet all these years :) I hope you find a good owner.

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | |

Thanks :) I hope too. The project deserves it.

captn3m0 2 years ago |

There was a GitHub org of “maintainers who want to maintain deaf projects” and had a formal adoption/governance process as well. I don’t remember if it catered to JS, but I can’t find it right now.

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | |

Did not find either :/

captn3m0 2 years ago | | |

I found it: https://jazzband.co/about/guidelines, but this is Python targeted.

https://adoptoposs.org/ is the next best thing to announce and find more maintainers. The announcement blog post has a few more links that might be of interest to you: https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-keep-open-source-softwa...

I_am_tiberius 2 years ago |

Didn't know about that project. Looks awesome. What are some cool java libraries to use in node.js?

renaudpawlak 2 years ago | |

You can take a look at https://github.com/j4ts, which contains some Java libs transpiled by JSweet to TS/JS. The AWT/Swing implementation is just a proof of concept, but some other libs are fully functional like awt/geom.

However, you have to be aware that the initial purpose of JSweet was not to port all Java libs to JS. JSweet allows the transpiler to be customized (with extensions) to map Java APIs to JS ones so that you don't necessarily need a JS runtime. It's all explained in the "Extending the transpiler" section of the core doc: https://github.com/cincheo/jsweet/blob/master/doc/jsweet-lan...