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

[Aral Balkan]

Hi everyone,

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, additions, etc. to this 
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!

All the best,
Aral