Shale is a modern web application framework, fundamentally based on JavaServer Faces. Architecturally, Shale is a set of loosely coupled services that can be combined as needed to meet particular application requirements. Shale provides additional functionality such as application event callbacks, dialogs with conversation-scoped state, a view technology called Clay, annotation-based functionality to reduce configuration requirements and support for remoting. Shale also provides integration links for other frameworks, to ease development when combinations of technologies are required.

Eric Raymond's white paper on the lessons learned from open source software production.  I capture these to assist in my thinking as we go forward with PennTags development.  The Cathedral model represents a closed, commercial approach to software development while the Bazaar represents the OSS model of development.

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
   
2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
3. "Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow." (Fred Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month", Chapter 11)
   Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
   Or, less formally, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." I dub this: "Linus's Law".
9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
    

Here's an example of what I think is happening...and how do we talk about this?  Are you with this?  Risk is everything...