Why Open Source Rocks!!

This week I have had one of those experiences that makes you love open source even more. Yes, open source is commonplace for Java developers but sometimes we forget how awesome open source can be.

This is not a post about some new whiz bang utility, a new version of an Ajax toolkit, or anything spectactular. It’s about the little things in deveoper life that allow you to be productive.

The story:
This week I have been working on some web services integration with Informatica. Informatica has a published set of WSDL files for running workflows and getting status information. I started with a new project and began with the login service. Obviously, a user has to login to the system before they can run workflows. When running the services I continually received an IndexOutOfBounds error. After digging into the CXF documentation and mailing lists, I found a variety of options, but none of them worked. At this point I was about 6-8 hours into the testing and was getting frustrated.

I then decided to post on the users mailing list which is the start of the “Rocks” part of this post.

Within 20 minutes I got a response from one of the lead developers on the toolkit. We had a couple of email exchanges over the next hour and the end result is that he identified a bug. He was going to work on the bug the next day and give me an update.

The next day, I got an email just after lunch stating that the fix is implemented and deployed in the latest Maven Snapshot.

I simply opened up my Maven pom.xml file and changed my versions to the new snapshot version. After downloading the new version, PRESTO, my code ran without errors and I was able to login to Informatica through the web services.

From the time of me posting on the mailing list to the deployed bug fix was less than 24 hours. Try that with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, or anyone else with a proprietary product. They would take 24 hours to get to level 3 support and you would almost never email directly with the lead developers.