New QDox lead: Robert Scholte

I’d like to announce the new lead for QDox, Robert Scholte.

Anyone who’s been following the project for the past year would have seen that Robert has made a tremendous number of contributions to all areas of QDox, including bug fixes, build, docs/website, releasing, user support and admin. If you follow the project further back, you’ll see that Robert has actually done more on the project in the past year than was done for the combined 6 years before that…. impressive.

I originally wrote QDox back in 2002, as a stop gap until annotations were added to the Java language. It was quickly picked up tools such as XDoclet. I always thought (and hoped) that once annotations made it into the language, it would be redundant. Yet it lived on. Unlike the JDK Annotation Processing Tool (APT), it could process source code rather than byte code in a simpler and faster manner. And it provided access to information that the JDK didn’t make available (e.g. parameter names). And it was useful where annotations still did not exist, like in JavaME. So, even in 2010, it still lives on and is used in tools such as Maven and Eclipse. But I cannot invest the time into it that I once could.

Given Robert’s commitment to the project, I can think of no better person to lead the project. He’s done an astounding job. Robert has kindly accepted this role and I’m delighted to hand it over to him.

I’d also like to use this opportunity to thank Paul Hammant, Mauro Talevi and Dennis Lundberg for their ongoing efforts on the project.