To be honest, I’m a little bit frustrated when talking about open-source development for QlikView. For quite some time I am trying to share as much content as possible and the response/feedback is little.
For a long time I was thinking that maybe I am just developing solutions which are not used/needed by customers and partners, but the last months have shown me that the reality is different:
- I – quite often – see my solutions (posted on this blog and on CodePlex and GitHub) in real world scenarios
- And furthermore my prototypes are taken and improved, but I never receive any feedback. That would be OK, but I would really expect that at least some customers or partners post their improvements by applying patches or improvements to CodePlex or GitHub … Unfortunately this has only happened once – today.
Can you imagine why there is no real open-source culture in the entire QlikView community?
Sure QlikCommunity is great and a lot of code-samples are posted there, but you can rarely find ready-to-go open-source solutions out there and furthermore I really miss these projects where many developers are working on the same code, inspiring each other – I only know a few QlikView related open-source initiatives:
- Rob Wunderlich has initated the QlikView Compenents project
- Rikard Braathen has published some very useful solutions on GitHub, like for example the qv-user-manager and the qv-affinity-configurator
- Brian Munz has recently announced that he will put some solutions on GitHub, for example the svgReader-Extension for QlikView 11
- Ralf Becher has published some content on GitHub including some QlikView related Gists
- Thomas Friebel – a QlikTech colleague in DACH – also started to publish some extensions on GitHub
- And there is me on CodePlex and GitHub
Are there other project out there which I do not know?
If you have a look at all the projects mentioned above there is little or no contribution by other developers beside the author (except the QlikView Components project).
Wouldn’t it be nice, if …
- … there were a lot more open-source projects out there with a vital community of QlikView developers?
- … some discussions on QlikCommunity result in useful code-pieces posted as Gists (or similar formats)?
- … you were able to use the resulting solutions in your daily life as a QlikView user/developer/consultant?
- … we were able to bring our know-how together to create astonishing solutions
- … we do not need to re-invent the wheel in many cases?
My Contribution
I can only talk for myself and how I am planning to improve the situation in the future:
- I am planing to move all my content from CodePlex to GitHub because GitHub seems to support participation of other developers much better.
- I am going to upload all my prototypes on GitHub, not only projects which are ready-to-use but also alpha versions of several prototypes.
- I will be happy to receive code-requests, patches and so on and integrate them into the main-line of my solutions.
Hmmm, really looking forward to reading your ideas and opinions regarding open-source development in the QlikView world.
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