Onward! Deacon Project gains new contributors, presses toward 1.0
Posted by Dave
A little over two months ago, I announced that the Deacon Project would be "back burnered" due to waning community interest and a general shortage of free time and spare cash on my part. I added a caveat, however: If anyone shows some interest in helping the project grow and mature, they have an open invitation to participate.
In the last two weeks, two new contributors have expressed an interest in seeing Deacon live "beyond beta"...
The first new contributor is a Swedish company, Attendit, providers of telephony and IT support services based in Stockholm. Leading the charge there is Ola Samuelsen, an open source software enthusiast with experience in software development and telecommunications. Along with Ola, devs at Attendit will start off by paying some much-needed attention (see what I did there?) to the Deacon issues list, fixing some longstanding issues that I've been too busy to definitively resolve on my own.
From there? We have a number of other ideas in the works too, with the goals of improving Deacon's robustness and extensibility, as well as fostering more community involvement...
Around the same time I heard from Ola, the topic of push notifications surfaced in a discussion with my partners at our engineering consulting firm, AppliedLogix. We specialize in developing embedded systems, and there are certainly many ways that the embedded world can benefit from mobile push capabilities. We're still exploring ideas, but we see several ways our firm might be involved in the Deacon Project, as well as other complimentary push-centric developments.
These days, push capabilities have gone beyond being a power-user feature for mobile software - in many application genres, they're simply expected. Now, emerging uses for push data delivery have the mobile industry buzzing, with new ideas surfacing all the time. An environment like this has a large solution space - and there's plenty of room for options of all sorts. I'm looking forward to seeing Deacon become a serious contender among those options, and thanks to the help of my colleagues at AppliedLogix, and new friends at Attendit, we have a solid shot at making that happen.