What a month! (Quick reflections two weeks after our Java switch)

2006-10-06

We announced our switch to Java two weeks ago. There was of course a lot of preparation before the announcement (besides just coding). That included: creating the new Nuxeo.org website, writing a FAQ, preparing slides, writing announcements for various media (InfoQ, TSS,…), and anticipating some discontent in the Zope community.

Well, two week after going public with the announcement, I’m glad to say that we are completely pleased with the way things went.

We already have released one of the key components of the platform, Nuxeo Runtime and are preparing to release Nuxeo Core this week. Overall, work on the project is going on at a steady pace and we are on track to meet the next milestones of our roadmap.

Our announcement got noticed both by the main Java sites, and countless blogs (including some in languages that we don’t understand without Google Translator).

There has been a little discontent, as expected, in the Zope community, but we mostly got some nice messages of people saying they understood our choice. The most heated discussions took place after Jean-Marc’s post (and its followups) supporting our change.

And, most importantly, we got many subscriptions to the mailing list, which shows there is a real interest in the developer community.

On the business side, we’ve had many calls from system integrators.

I’m especially glad to notice that in two weeks, we got contacts from several new systems integrators, telling us that, now we are using Java, they will be very happy to work with us on new projects. Consequence: we now have a commercial contact with 8 of the 10 leaders of ECM integration in France (some of them the french subsidies of international groups), as well as interesting partnership projects with a big name (I mean BIIIIG) software vendor (more on this another day).