Jexus Manager: The Open Source Plan

I was at Jiaodong Development Conference 2015 last Saturday, giving a talk on Jexus web server. One important announcement I made there, was to open source Jexus Manager source code. It was not a sudden decision, as when I demonstrated this product to geeks such as Scott Hanselman, he really thought that open sourcing it would be a good option.

It is relatively easy to make a decision than carrying out the plan. Different from most of my previous projects, Jexus Manager was not initially open sourced, due to a few reasons,

1. Jexus web server is not open source.
2. The development involves a few technologies I didn’t know well at that time, so the code is messy.
3. Even at this stage of 2.0 Beta 3, the code quality is not as high as I wanted.

Thus, to release the code in 2016 as truly open source, I will have to stop developing new features for a short while, clean up the code base, and add necessary documentation. Hope the following schedule can be hit without further delay.

Schedule

2016 Q1: Clean up my open source implementation of Microsoft.Web.Administration and release it at GitHub. It features the following,

• Fully in C# (Microsoft’s implementation binds to native COM)
• Cross platform (can run on OS X and Linux, for Jexus web server)
• Unit test cases covered
• Fix a few issues of Microsoft’s implementation [Updated on Jan 16, 2016: Now at GitHub https://github.com/jexuswebserver/Microsoft.Web.Administration under MIT license.]

[Updated on Feb 10, 2016: The NuGet package is at https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Web.Administration.Jexus/11.0.0-beta.]

2016 Q2: Clean up my open source implementation of Microsoft.Web.Management and release it at GitHub. Since I haven’t yet implemented all classes, the open source version will have many gaps for the community to fill in.

2016 Q3: Clean up and release all the remaining code of Jexus Manager.

[Updated on June 26, 2016: Jexus Manager is now fully open source]

Stay tuned.