Monday, March 2, 2015

Codehaus: The Once Great House of Code Has Fallen

It was announced on the Codehaus website this past week that "The time has come to end the era of Codehaus." This page includes a rough timeline of when projects and services will be deactivated. This includes mention that "projects and services will be progressively taken offline from April 2nd 2015 onwards" and "most projects and services will be terminated around May 17th 2015."

Codehaus has played a significant role in the world of Java development. An interesting and brief retrospective on Codehaus's glory days can be found in the one of the comments on the Java sub-reddit thread "Codehaus, birthplace of many Java OSS projects, coming to an end." A bit more history of Codehaus can be found, for now, in Codehaus | About | History. Some Java-related projects hosted on Codehaus include AspectWerkz, Castor, PicoContainer, and XStream. Well-known Java-related projects that were formerly on Codehaus before moving somewhere else include JMock, Mule, Jackson, and XDoclet.

Until recently, Groovy and its documentation were accessed at http://groovy.codehaus.org/ (now accessed via http://groovy-lang.org/). Other notable Groovy-related codehaus-based URLs include http://gpars.codehaus.org/, http://groovy.codehaus.org/GroovyFX (now http://groovyfx.org/), and http://griffon.codehaus.org/.

Just as GeoCities was overtaken by other web hosting sites and social media, and just as Dr. Dobb's was overtaken by a plethora of online content covering everything from low-level details to high-level breadth, Codehaus was overtaken by SourceForge and Google Code and eventually GitHub has overtaken all of them.

Although Codehaus's influence has been waning in recent years, it housed several significant projects during its heyday. It seemed inevitable that its time would come as SourceForge and then GitHub took developers' mind share, but it still brings a bit of sadness to see a well-known and once-proud House meeting its end. Thanks to all those who contributed to Codehaus and to the influential projects housed on Codehaus.

1 comment:

@DustinMarx said...

An interesting history of the rise and fall of Codehaus is available at http://www.codehaus.org/history/.