An Architect's View

After I posted my instructions for building Railo from the latest source in SVN, there were some appreciative tweets and success stories but Erik-Jan Jaquet asked can you explain to me WHY I would want that? It's a very good question so here are some of my thoughts on why you might decide to build an open source project from source yourself...Why build any open source project from scratch? 1. Because you can! For some people there's a sense of achievement in seeing something come to life on their local machine even if they never look at the code. It's also a verification that the open source project is truly open: that you can simply download the source, run a simple build script and have the software up and running. 2. Because it gives you the very latest version! You've seen the team post that a particular bug is fixed or a new feature has been added and you want to try it out. You could wait until whenever the next official build appears - or you could just update from SVN and build it locally and take the new feature or bug fix for a test drive. 3. Because you can fix bugs yourself! This is the first reason where you need knowledge of the language the product is written in. Railo is written in Java so you might like the first two reasons but this reason might be going to far for you. On the other hand, it could be a great way to help you learn Java. Tracking down bugs and fixing them is a really good skill to practice and refine and working on someone else's code base also gives you a new view of the world. Certainly, if you have skills in the source language, fixing bugs in your own local copy of the product can be very valuable and it's one of the main reasons that many enterprise level companies are taking open source more seriously these days. Companies can keep a copy of the project source, carefully tweaked and tuned for their own needs, safe in the knowledge that if they upgrade to a newer build and the bug reappears, they can quickly reapply their fix and continue working. Of course, if you fix any bugs, it's good practice to submit the patches back to the core product team (adding them to a bug report, for example) so that others can benefit from your fix and the product can improve - which will increase its user base and therefore increase the resources available for support (both more users able to offer assistance and more business for the company offering the product, who can then afford to provide even better service). 4. Because you want to add features! This is going a step beyond bug fixing but this tends to be the reason stated by most individuals who get excited about building products from source code. Of course, with Railo, there are ways to extend the product that don't require you to build from source. You can add new built-in tags easily as CFC-based custom tags. You can write extensions based on the interfaces provided by the Java code (see the Java API documentation for Railo) - you only need railo.jar, not the source, in order to build such extensions. Of course, if you want to enhance the core language the engine understands, then you need to build from source. Again, show your open source community spirit by submitting patches back to the core team via JIRA tickets so that others can benefit from your work. It's also worth saying don't be offended if your suggested enhancement is rejected by the core team - there are many reasons why a community submitted patch may not pass the team's inspection (e.g., performance, introduces other bugs or compatibility issues, just doesn't fit with the vision and direction for the project). If you've built open source projects from scratch in the past, post a comment and share your reasons!