Announcing OpenARP.org, the advisory committee and the ARP subversion repository

This announcement is long overdue but I wanted to make sure that we had everything in place before making it.

I am very happy to announce that ARP has a new home and an absolutely amazing Advisory Committee comprised of some truly wonderful people. Our new home is http://OpenARP.org and you can see the advisory committee list at http://www.openarp.org/index.php?page=ARP+Advisory+Committee

The new web site is a Wiki -- a WysiwygWiki to be precise (http://WysiwygWiki.org) -- to better enable the whole community to partake in the sharing of information on ARP.

The advisory committee has already started debating the future direction of ARP (and please keep sending your thoughts, questions, additions, etc. to the general ARP mailing list also) and will begin committing experimental additions to ARP's new Subversion repository in the coming days. Which brings me to... ARP's new Subversion repository. Here's the URL:

http://svn.sourcesecure.co.uk/osflash/arp

(There's not much that's new there at the moment but, believe me, there will be in the coming days!)

By the way, as part of this move, ARP no longer stands for anything other than ARP. In other words, it no longer stands for the Ariaware RIA Platform. It's no longer an acronym (we have our hands full with FAME, FAMES, FLAMES, etc.) :) The name was a legacy artifact dating back to the days when ARP was a closed-source framework at Ariaware which we actually licensed to our clients.

Although the winds of changes are a-blowin', please know that there are a couple of overriding principles that we will adhere to as we take ARP forward:

1. Simplicity before all else (the core of ARP will never mushroom into a complicated mess) 2. Documentation, documentation, documentation!

3. Commitment to the Flash ecosystem (Flash, Flex, MTASC, etc.)

So, for example, although you may see that new utility classes get added to the framework over time, these will always be optional and will not create any dependencies on the core framework. Again, you may find that the experimental branch of the SVN tree grows to include interesting additions/extensions -- but these will not be included in the stable branch until they are fully documented and then only if the utility they provide does not outweigh any simplicity they remove.

Finally, ARP is now part of the OSFlash movement (http://osflash.org). There has been a groundswell of activity in open source Flash projects recently and OSFlash.org aims to support this by providing a common information hub, community tools (like the OSFlash and Swfmill mailing lists) as well as repository hosting for open source projects through SourceSecure.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to the new ARP Advisory Committee members and a big thank-you to everyone who has supported and continues to support and use ARP. These are exciting times for ARP and exciting times for open source Flash and I'm just happy to be a part of it!

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