Last week I mentioned a kind message Sanjay Velamparambil sent to the 4Suite list. As I said, "it's always pleasing to me as a developer to hear a voice ring out from the noise clearly appreciating the value of the work we've done." This week, Amara gets some love.
In a message to the 4Suite list Wednesday Tom Lazar said:
i just wanted to chime in that just yesterday I had an urgent, real- world problem in where I needed to manipulate an XML Document
programmatically - grep/sed/awk on the textfile would have been too
difficult ("now you've got two problems"[tm]) and an XSLT alone
wouldn't have done it either.using Amara i hacked a python script that did the whole job in
(literally) ten minutes. as I started the script I was a bit
apprehensive: afterall our script would pick out certain nodes and
assign new values to them (or delete them, depending) and then write
it back to the file - but it all worked without a hitch.and looking at the script, you'd never think it was handling XML at
all ;-)so thanks for making Amara and keep up the good work!
You're very welcome, Tom, and thanks for all the help with improving the bindery mutation API.
As if that wasn't enough, the same day I got a private message from another user. I haven't asked his permission so I won't identify him at the moment, but he actually put together a video clip of himself demonstrating Amara. In the clip he shows the eight or so custom Python modules for XML processing that were replaced with a one-liner using Amara. My only regret is that he and his team had to write all that other code in the first place, before finding Amara, but at least they don't have to maintain it any more.
Feedback like that makes all the long hours worthwhile.