I had recently stabilised developments of a major open source library written in Java. I have then published an article on the server side, which has brought me a lot of positive (but also critic, constructive) feedback. And a first contributor, which is great!
- See the article here: http://www.theserverside.com/discussions/thread.tss?thread_id=61162
- And the library: http://jooq.sourceforge.net
So with all of that good feedback, I have a great feeling about my project, in a way that I am creating something useful and original. Some key ideas behind my project, and why I think it is original:
- It’s an or-mapper. OK, now that really isn’t original… 😉
- It has code generation in it. OK, still not original. But that’s always nice.
- It allows for creating type-safe queries in Java using its own domain specific language. That’s better. No string concatenation. JPA has only just recently copied criteria queries from Hibernate.
- It allows for doing so with all SQL features, including complex joins, nested selects, unions, aliasing, etc. Now that seems original to me. OR-mappers tend to try to ignore the relational data model behind RDBMS.
- It supports all kinds of native non-standard functionality like UDTs, stored procedures, native functions, etc. I don’t know any or-mapper that does that.
I think that these key ideas are useful for a very specific type of developer. That specific developer
- interfaces Java with huge legacy databases.
- knows SQL well and wants to use it extensively.
- doesn’t want to learn any new language (HQL, JPQL, etc)
- doesn’t want to spend one minute fine-tuning some sophisticated XML-configuration.
- wants little abstraction over SQL, because his software is tightly coupled with his database. Something that I think the guys at Hibernate or JPA seem to have ignored.
- EDIT: needs a strong but light-weight library for database access. For instance when they develop for mobile devices (see comment by SRM).
Now is the beginning of the hard work. How to get attention? How can I attain a bigger crowd? How can my project become relevant? How to reach to that “specific type of developer”?
I would say set up a professional looking site (one that doesn’t look like it was designed by a 15 year old script kiddie). Make sure you have ample documentation with plenty of help and/or tutorials for using your library. Example applications are also good to see a real world usage of the library.
Once you have that setup I would do some typical SEO to drive traffic to your site. This includes blog articles, links back to your page and or articles, and possibly buying some Addwords from google.