How you can help.

Java Desktop for X Window

What Qualifications Do You Need To Have In Order To Help Out?
None at all! You are free to contribute whatever you can, according to your own time schedule and personal work loads. All you need to do is inform us about what you are doing so that we can coordinate with other developers. This will help us to avoid repeating the same work over and over again. If you desire a Open Source Java desktop that can compete with Gnome/KDE like we do, we will need to join forces and work together or else that dream will never come true for any of us.

How You Can Help.
JD4X is still at its infant stage and there are alot of areas still under development. Your support will greatly assist us in bringing JD4X out of its growing pains and into maturity. We hope that the project can bring together a Java internet community who are interested in Open Source desktop development. Currently only 30% of what was designed for JD4X has started development. Here are a list of things you can contribute:

JD4X compliant Java applications commonly used in all desktop systems. Refer to the dns.sxw document for a complete list of missing applications in the section on JD4X utility suite.
Applets on the task bar such as:

Clocks.
Simple email notification tool.
Disk mounting applet.
Weather applet.
Dictionary applet.
Any other applet you think JD4X is missing.

Lots of missing Major Modules. Refer to the dns.sxw document for a complete list of missing modules in the section on JD4X desktop system requirement.
Graphic designers for icons, logo, splashscreen and etc. The project needs a lot of graphic artist to help design themes for the Java desktop.
Desktop configuration tools with XML.
Website maintainers who can help make the JD4X project home page more user friendly.
Documentation writers and maintainers, which includes writing tutorials on "How to" articles.
Testers and evaluators who can give us constructive feedback on development releases.
Help us spot spelling and grammatical errors in all our documents and politely inform us about it.
GUI designers who can make JD4X look fancy and cool. Most importantly, making the desktop easier to use.
Administration maintainers who can help asker questions in our forums, which includes writing our FAQ column, manage mailing lists and keep JD4X users well informed about changes and updates that may affect them.

JD4X has been designed from the very beginning to allow independent development efforts, if you are contributing code such as a new module, there should be no problem to start work on your own and later combine efforts before making a new release. We do not use CVS on the sourceforge.net site to share code due to various reasons (However, we plan to have our own CVS in the future). For now, we think that emailing, IRC and the project forum is a better option to share ideas.

If you are interested to contribute to JD4X, please sent us an email with a reliable email address. In the mail, please describe in summary about what and how you can contribute to the Open Source Java desktop. Please include any code or binaries if you already have a sample for us to review. If we use your contribution and distribute it together with the default desktop, we will acknowledge your work in our default desktop, dns.sxw document and website. We will also expect that you will be maintaining and developing the package yourself. All issues and feedbacks regarding your contribution will also be redirected to you. However, if we did not include your contribution together with the default distribution, we will still add it to our list of compliant JD4X software downloads so that the JD4X end user can have a large array of software to choose from.

Are There Any Restrictions To Your Contributions?

You should inform the original developers before making changes to their code in our shared CVS. (JD4X's own CVS is planned in the future)
We also expect contributers to be responsible and not contribute code that has been copied from else where, in particular commercial products or code that belongs to licenses that are incompatible with the GPL. This rule will include graphics and other design components.
You should never claim credit for code or other items that you copied, please give the credit to the appropriate people because they deserve it.

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