Geekybuddha

in love with FOSS

Posts Tagged ‘python’

The age of Sahana

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Being a part of Sahana FOSS community since last year. I have learned a lot. Its always wonderful to be a part of FOSS community. Since last summer of code, I worked upon another module for Sahana , worked on some feature enhancement for Haiti deployment and is thinking about a couple of new ideas to work upon. It was very smooth to get into Sahana community. Everyone around is so friendly. The documentation is fair enough. But since the core of Sahana was built 5 years back, it certainly requires to adopt the newer methodology. I havent touched the core of Sahana, I worked on modules and learned the framework. Good thing about sahana is the community people have lots of knowledge and expertise of Disaster Management. Sahana had been deployed in number of disasters and all the experience from these deployments makes Sahana developers understand disaster management much better and hence they can make much better software.

Since Sahana was designed with technologies and methodologies which are not advance enough for current world, it is now becoming difficult for developing upon it. Lots of discussion happened over porting Sahana to some well known frameworks such as Zend, Drupal etc but no decision could be taken. This may be a part of foss development, but certainly not a part of a healthy foss development. Its worthless to blame anyone.

I know the expertise of Sahana developers will not be wasted. We have another project under Sahana Community going along nicely, thats written in python and is led by Fran. I am avoiding giving names to these projects since this is another big subject of discussion inside the community. And the kind of idea being proposed for this years gsoc are promising, which tells that we have a great future ahead.

Still I wish I were good enough to lead the PHP development to revive( ameen). Its not just about code and skills but much more. My journey so far is amazing. I think I could have learnt a lot, but its never less.  I am now in a dilema to where to move forward, to jump into python and contribute to python project ? or wait for some decision by PMC board to take a decision on the fate of PHP. My only regret is that someone need to lead and I could be :( Some day!