In September 2009, Seneca College students along with other developers began the work to complete the Processing port to JavaScript. In order to facilitate an architecture for participation a number of things needed to happen. First and foremost the source code had to be readily available. Secondly, the inner workings of the project and the missing functionality must be publicized and a dialog started. To this end the source code was made available publicly on GitHub and an issue tracking system was used to manage the large number of issues needed to be resolved in order to complete the port. A review process was setup to ensure that the code submitted was of sufficient quality.
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Society has a vital interest in encouraging and rewarding innovation. Presently, there are two major models characterizing how this may be done. The first, the “private investment” model and the second, the “collective action” model (von Hippel and von Krogh 2003). Von Hippel and von Krogh go on to say that the private investment model assumes private returns to the innovator resulting from private goods and efficient rule of intellectual property protection. Whereas the collective action model assumes collaboration from multiple innovators resulting in a public good that can be accessed by anyone.
The phenomenon of open source software development illustrates that in order to solve a shared or personal technical problem, users program and reveal their innovations without getting private returns from selling the software. The source code of open source software is made freely available so that users can access, modify, and redistribute it (Shuo July 2010). Open source projects are released under the terms and requirements of certain licenses.
The processingjs project was started by one individual who wanted to utilize the HTML5 canvas element and take advantage of the Java Processing language. It took about seven months to get a working version, consisting of 5000 lines of code, of the project released. However, the part of the project that allowed for dynamic conversion of code written in the Processing language, to JavaScript, referred to as the parser, was limiting. Moreover, the release contained a lot of gaps as some of the functionality was not yet supported (Resig 2008).
The project, similarly to other open source products, was released with the hope that a developer community will converge around it and contribute to development. The Mozilla experience however, suggests that proprietary products may not be well-suited to distributed development if they have tightly-coupled architectures. There is a need to create an “architecture for participation,” one that promotes ease of understanding by limiting module size, and ease of contribution (MacCormack, Rusnak and Baldwin 2004). In order to facilitate an architecture for participation a number of things needed to happen. First and foremost the source code must be readily available. Secondly, the inner workings of the project and the missing functionality must be publicized and a dialog started.
A Git repository was started to allow contributors and users easy access to the project’s source code. Git is an extremely fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software. The repository is hosted by GitHub which provides an online way of collaborating with others and forking repositories (GitHub Social Coding 2010). GitHub makes Open Source’s fork-and-extend legal capability a practical reality (Walsh 2009). This promotes a pressure free environment where any contributor can alter the code of their own repository without worrying about their coding style or syntax.
To raise awareness and encourage dialog both a project website and an online discussion channel were made. The website consisted of tutorials that allowed novice users to quickly pick-up the project, demonstrations of previous Java Processing examples that were ported to processingjs, and a list of features that were not yet supported. Furthermore an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel was made to allow for general discussions on the project as well as a Google Group which would facilitate discussions for those unfamiliar with IRC.
The project grew and attracted numerous contributors. However, as Behlendorf (1999) stated, “essential to the health of an open-source project is that the project have sufficient momentum to be able to evolve and respond to new challenges. Nothing is static in the software world, and each major component requires maintenance and new enhancements continually”. To support the growth of the project Lighthouse, an online issue tracking system was put in place. Lighthouse allows anyone to create tickets related to the project. A ticket may have many purposes including reporting a bug in the current code, requesting a new feature, or simply starting a discussion. A major advantage to using Lighthouse is the ability to plan milestones and allow users to see which features and bugs fixes will be available in the next release. Not to mention the tracking of discussions that have already happen that novice users and new contributors can learn from. Of course an issue tracking system is not all the project needed to succeed. In September of 2009 ten students from Canada’s Seneca College joined the project with the hopes of releasing a 1.0 version – the projects first stable release. The introduction of new contributors was vital to the health of the project. As identified by Liu et al (2010), a high turn-over rate of developers is common in an Open Source project but it also proves to be very challenging. With a dedicated team that included a release engineer it became possible to have frequent releases of the project and an up-to-date project repository. However, it also brought to life another well known problem often found in Open Source projects; bad code quality.
A 2008 study done by Koch and Neumann that analyzed the impact on quality and design associated with the number of contributors and the amount of their work yielded the following conclusion. “We identify the number of commits, the number of distinct programmers, and the active time as factors of influence which have a negative effect on quality. In particular, complexity and size are negatively influenced by these process metrics. Furthermore a high concentration of added work fosters bad quality.” To ensure that all code patches meat the coding standards, and passed various tests a two step review process was put in place. The first step was a peer-review that can be performed by virtually anyone but was usually performed by another contributor. The second step was a super-review that was performed by only the contributors that had the appropriate status. In order to be able to perform super-reviews a contributor must have a combination of the following, advanced JavaScript knowledge, thorough knowledge of the project and its components, or the ability to identify potential problems. In addition to this process each release was thoroughly tested on all platforms and all supporting browsers.
In December of 2010 the first stable version of processingjs was released. Included in the release were over 1,000 bug fixes, features, and under-the-hood improvements. At the time the project had twenty six recorded code contributors, eleven of which had the status of super reviewer. At least twenty users logged in to the IRC channel at any given time, 608 members of the Google Group and 99 forks of its repository.
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==DOM Integration==
