Chris Holmes wrote:
Just for interest - do you know what he plans to do on geoserver? I would
like to chat with him to see if there is stuff we can do together..Talk to Jody Garnett, as he's leading the project right now. I'm ccing him, as he'll be interested in what we've been chatting about. And I'm chatting with him right now, and he says he's in pretoria right now and could be available to stop by tomorrow. Or is also just in joburg and willing to stop by and chat.
Simple - make it grow up 
#1 Module
It really needs to have a module system so we can accept input from other developers, it breaks my heart when people leave because we cannot accept their code 
Indeed I have been concerned about the branch system geoserver is using now, and I know the only way to fix this culture is with a technology band aid.
#2 J2EE Team Player
It also needs to be a well behaved "normal" J2EE player, make use of the connection pool in the J2EE DataSource for example. Use JMX beans for configuration and so on.
#3 Component / Ease of Use
This is more of a problem with GeoTools, but I also need it to work with technologies such as Hibernate - think of it as a PojoDataStore. The GeoTools system is in need of a serious QA to allow it to be usable to the those coming from a J2EE background (used to containers etc...). The GeoTools feature model actively prevent this, and now that it is being fixed in the geotools fm branch I am very happy to see progress in this direction.
#4 Communication and Performance
GeoServer has also run into a more modern system build on SOAP/WSDL that may be of interest, and is needed to modernize. For large data I am still more hopeful with the likes of GTXML holds more long term promise. However a module that let you use your custom JAXB bindings to your Pojo DataStore would not go amiss.
In short we have a really nice project here, and there are some very easy fixes to be made, and the one hard one (the feature model work) is underway. I feel that once the feature model work is complete we are going to see a lot of things become possible and life will be very interesting.
Jody