Thread: Address required for an OSS domain

A product is created to address some requirement that doesn't have a solution yet. What was the requirement in your case? Also, was it a personal requirement (as it often happens when you create a product in the OSS domain) or a part of someone else's requirement (e.g., a customer's)?

The key requirement was to make installation and set-up very quick and easy for novice users. This required both research and technical (applied) problems to be solved.
The first research problem was dealing with overwhelming component choice. There are so many choices of IDE, DBMS, servlet containers/ application servers, ORM, and more, that beginners would be overwhelmed before they even started. We wanted to find a good balance of choices that we could make in advance, which would satisfy the needs of novice users.

Samrat's master's thesis, done in parallel to this project, was focused on the distribution of software components with conflicting licences. Another research problem was to determine the appropriate places to automate configuration and actions on behalf of the developer/user. Then, we applied (wrote and tested) code to do so. The other key technical problem was to deliver this software with an installer that would provide a positive experience. We aimed for installation in five clicks or less and a time lapse of 15 minutes maximum (for a typical modern computer).