Whew, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work I have ahead of me for xajax 0.5 and Willowgarden DP2. Not that it’s particularly difficult or time-consuming compared to the work I’ve already done, but in both cases the work requires a singularly focused and specific train of thought, which is tricky to keep up for long.

In the case of xajax 0.5, we’re looking at the most substantial and architecture-altering upgrade in the entire history of the project. xajax is nearly a year old, and I jumped on board around October 2005, so it was already getting established when I started working on improvements. The latest release, 0.2.4, is a fine product, but I feel like the true potential of xajax has only just begun. I want 0.5 to provide an incredible platform for a huge ecosystem of innovation around the Ajax concept, and it’s going to take a huge amount of design precision to make that happen. In particular, xajax is going to be retrofitted to work around a hot-swappable plugin architecture, so it will be possible to extend it completely in three major areas: the Javascript client side, the server request processing side, and the response command output side. It’ll be amazing if done right, but a train wreck if done poorly, so there’s a lot riding on the outcome of this endeavor.

As for Willowgarden, Developer Preview 1 was a decent first start, but there’s a ton of work still to do — a lot of which isn’t even code related. I need to get the wiki up and running and start writing How To’s and the beginnings of a real User’s Guide. And on the code side, I want to have a fair amount of unit tests in place for DP2, as well as some additional sample apps to play with.

Hey, it’s all fun. Otherwise, why am I doing all this?!?!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Willowgarden, xajax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.