Dream – looking for maintainers to take ownership

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Dream, the Web framework, is looking for a maintenance team!

I originally wrote Dream in 2021, and actively maintained it for several years. It has gotten many great contributions from other authors since its first release, for which I am very grateful!

At the present time, I am no longer in a position to sustainably maintain Dream. I’d like to yield it to one or several maintainers, who would have the ability to pursue their vision, bring their ideas, credibly seek funding for work that substantially affects it, and cite it on their resume or elsewhere. In other words, to take ownership of it. I would stay on in an advisory role, to transfer knowledge, help negotiate, and assist in various ways, as a volunteer.

We’ve already been having Dream community development meetings over on Discord since August, which have been very helpful. Last month, I transferred Dream to an org on GitHub. It’s ready for the next step :slight_smile:

Dream has a very large amount of interesting work to do. The original motivation was not only to create a modern, highly ergonomic Web framework in a minimal sense, but to do a whole tour through the OCaml Web development ecosystem and address every other place where a major library is missing, or where quality of life can be improved. See the roadmap for some of the many ideas.

In fact, we had started working on this back in 2022 with a small team of people, and created an OAuth library. That enterprise was unfortunately terminated by events outside our control, and the logical step now is for me to yield control of Dream itself to a differently structured team, for its natural development :slight_smile:

If you’re interested, please DM me here on Discuss! If you have such, please link your projects related to Web development, or where you have been a maintainer. Let me know if you’re a user of Dream, and what you’d like to see in Web development in OCaml.

Thank you!

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Hi antron.

I have to say you did amazing work creating dream.
I have 3 web application built with it.
Here is one of them, GitHub - aguluman/memoir: How can a Man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the tempest of his Gods.

I do not have the knowledge you have, but I would love to contribute to the project.
Looking at the roadmap, I see there is work to be done.
I would be happy to do what I can with the time I have.

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Is this the end of the dream? It’s sad.

There’s a lot I’d like to do, a lot I’d like to change, like typing the routing, getting rid of Lwt (making it I/O agnostic), optimizing the unnecessary allocations, and so on.

It’s a lot of work. Thank you for starting the project! I hope someone will pick it up and maybe I’ll be able to contribute to it in the future. :sunny:

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Just to be clear–I have already told antron that I will volunteer to be a maintainer (which I am also doing now). But it would be great to have others step up as well. I’m not exactly an expert in the low-level I/O of Dream and it would be nice to have multiple people with different strengths to complement each other.

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We can continue the web-dev meeting bi-weekly on fridays as antron started?
I too do not have the knowledge yet.
But over time, I can pick it up.
What do you say @yawaramin ?

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While I haven’t used Dream for anything serious yet, I have quite a bit of experience with FOSS maintainership, including company-backed projects with sometimes considerable numbers of contributors. I worked at dev.to for two years, where interacting with our contributor community was a core part of my job. If you think this experience could be helpful @yawaramin/@antron I’d be happy to volunteer some of my time for this project (issue triage, re-thinking the issue and PR labeling system, processes, etc.)

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Hello,

I would like to contribute to the project since it’s aligned with some goals I have (creating an open source real time database synchronization library). I have very strong low level client/server and HTTP protocol knowledge. The only thing is I just learned OCaml last week, but I really like the language and would love your guidance on what some good first issues from GitHub would be.

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It’s not at all the end of Dream! We’re already looking at a small team of strong maintainers (specific people), but I wanted to ask publicly as well, so that we don’t just pass it on to a small in-group exclusively and without any consultation or warning, not knowing at all who else is out there :slight_smile: And for the people here who are ready to contribute but not maintain (thank you!), it will be good for maintainers to get in touch with you, and maybe you would be in a position to join later.

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  1. @syaiful6 launched Tapak; Maybe we could join efforts, while maintaining two separate projects?

  2. Even open-source and non-profit projects should be driven by a business model. See Working in Public. @sabine, would OCaml Software Foundations step for guiding the community? Maybe we start with business mentorship sessions on a monthly basis?

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