Forgive me for getting off topic here, but I want to discuss a pet theory of mine about a subject near and dear to my heart - the Miami Hurricanes and the Miami Dolphins. We fans of either (or both) team know how far a team can fall quickly, but I think there is more to it than that...I think there is the ominous sign of the beast at work here.

Three new projects and several updates this week, including a new FarCry beta. I know this is a little early, but I had the time and so I decided to get it done ;)

As you might have caught from Peter Bell's recent post, I was toying with his LightWire lightweight dependency-injection framework. For handling a concept that sounds complicated, LightWire is pretty simple. The component itself was pretty short and I actually managed to shorten it further I believe by simply cleaning up some code issues. Nonetheless, it did exactly what it advertised with almost no overhead, performance-wise. Granted, this does not have anything near the feature-set of ColdSpring, but it it achieves the basic necessities very simply and efficiently (it is nothing more than a single component and programmatic config file). It also is geared towards supporting "transient" objects, which I will cover more later.

The biggest new this week was of course the launch of RIAForge, which offers a full set of features and has managed to both draw some existing projects to move there as well as draw out a number of new projects. So, we end up with another week of 5 new projects and 1 new announced project. The growth of new projects has even forced me to have to contemplate what constitutes an open source project and how that affects what goes on the list and the CF community as a whole. In fact, I have already been forced to shorten my commentary/summary on the posts below in order to accommodate all the news (more time-wise than space-wise), which will likely remain the standard going forward unfortunately (although this is good news overall since it is because of the massive growth in the quantity of projects and their activity overall).

Well, now you all have gone and done it. I put up my open source list close to one year ago (originally it was just a blog post) with about 60-70 projects, perhaps less. Back then, there were so few projects I managed to avoid having to answer the basic question of what constitutes an open source project. However, recently there has been an explosion (of sorts) of new CF open source projects, and the launch of RIAForge has even brought several new ones out into the open that every week I have found more and more need to excercise some form of editorial control over what appears on the list and on the updates. I keep having to ask myself, "Is this an open source project?" The answer comes back feeling too arbitrary and subjective for my own comfort.