Finally got latest versions out. SPOPS 0.53 was a week ago, then a helpful developer pointed out a bug which was promptly fixed by 0.54. OpenInteract 1.35 has a very extensive Changelog, particularly when you consider that most of the interesting stuff happens in the packages, each of which has their own log.
Now that it's released, I need to upgrade a site running (IIRC) 1.2 to 1.35. It will be a little difficult but hopefully not too bad. It will be a chance to create a 'common upgrade experience' type of log, altho I don't know how many people actually upgrade.
In general, I don't hear much from people using OpenInteract. This could be a good thing -- I put a lot of effort into making installation easy, so maybe people just understand it and are working merrily away -- or a bad thing -- they try it for a bit, don't get immediate gratification and throw it on the scrap heap. General feedback is nice every once in a while :-)
Java stuff is going ok. I still get frustrated when easy things aren't easy, but that's just java. I'm trying to keep the attitude that Java is something I want to get very good at -- at least somewhere around my current Perl proficiency.
An idle thought -- why hasn't someone taken the CPAN tools and just created a CJAN from them? Clearly some of the items are different -- there's no standard for building/testing as in Perl, but at least it gives you a powerful registration/browsing/mirroring/distribution system. There's always the canard that the tools should be written in the language they're dealing with. My answer to this is: let's get it working, then you and the other language purists can get right on that for version 2 :-)
Java is in a much different area from Perl in this respect -- Sun acts as a central authority (for APIs, code, etc.) where Perl has none. Hackers abhor a vacuum, so it got filled. It's hard to get motivated to fill something that's already got something (however small) there.
(Originally posted elsewhere)