@granjef3: Thanks for reading and for the compliments. We've have been working hard on this for more than a year, so it's great to hear that you found it helpful. If you find anything that needs clarification, please file an issue on the GitHub repository.
Regarding Eclipse, Ant, and some of the other technologies, we wanted to stay aligned with what WPILib does as much as possible, even if we'd have chosen differently. We wanted Strongback to feel like a natural extension to WPILib.
We absolutely would love to have people join us and become contributors! In fact, we hope that is the case. This is an open source project, and we'll welcome everyone that wants to help. Having said that, our goal for this first release was to provide a basic but solid foundation of our original core ideas, so that a community can develop around it and take Strongback where the community wants to go. For example, there's lots of room for expansion, especially with vision, control systems, real time monitoring and analytics, and covering more hardware functionality (just to name a few). To those who have experience in these areas, please join us and share your knowledge.
We'd also love the community to define one or more "test platforms" (see
this issue), which basically are published open source designs for physical hardware and test code that works with that design. The goal would be that multiple teams could independently build their own version of these test platforms so that, when Strongback is getting close to a release, multiple teams could independently run the verification tests on their hardware and submit their results. Essentially, it's a form of collaborative and distributed quality assurance for the library itself, helping us know that the Strongback releases will be solid for teams that use it.
Anyway, there's lots we (the whole Strongback community) can do, and it's yet another way that teams within the FIRST family can collaborate, work together, and show that everyone can benefit.