Even to the casual observer it’s not too hard to notice that not much has happened with SLAMD in quite a while.  In fact, it’s been almost two years since my last commit to the public repository.  There are several reasons for this, including:

• It works pretty doggone well in its current state.  I still use it quite a bit and hear that several other people do, too.  There are definitely ways that it could be improved, but so far it has been able to meet my needs.  Most of the SLAMD code that I have written since then has been in the form of new jobs that were pretty task-specific and not something that are likely to be useful in other environments.
• Most of the time, I have been really busy with other things.  I just haven’t had nearly as much time to invest in it as I would have liked.  Of course, I did have a forced two-month vacation near the end of last year, but the terms of my severance stated that I wasn’t allowed to do any work and I didn’t want to press my luck.  After that period ended I’ve been going full-steam-ahead on something else.
• There are parts of it that could do with a redesign.  The code used to generate the administrative interface is currently all held in one large file and could stand to be broken up.  There are also many areas in which updating the code to require Java 5 would allow it to be much more efficient and scalable, and the introduction of features like generics and enums would make the code easier and safer to edit.

Ultimately, I think that it’s at the point where it would be better to invest the effort in a clean rewrite than to try to build upon what’s there now, but so far I haven’t had much opportunity to do either one of them.  It’s definitely something that I would like to do and I’m hopeful that I might have the time to do it at some point in the future.  I have a lot of ideas for interesting and powerful enhancements, so I don’t want to count it out just yet.