Hi,
A quick sum up of the current situation:
* Releases
The branch 2.2.x is dead unless we find people interested in testing it.
We're releasing a first version of tiles-3 branch with the new
tiles-request and tiles-autotag. We have the 3 bindings votes to release
it and will probably have a consensus on Beta Quality. I'll try and
complete the release process this week or next.
The git mirror is still stale; you may use my own mirror at github if
you wish, just make sure to base your work on the svn-tracking branches
(not on my experiments).
* The road to GA
From now on I feel we will use JIRA more extensively. There were a
number of wide-scoped issues in 3.0.0; one or the other could describe
almost anything we were doing and there were too many changes to track
individually anyway, especially when removing unreleased stuff.
I've created JIRAs on the issues we've identified since the release
was tagged; please feel free to create more.
* Long term roadmap
Perhaps it's time to start discussing the future.
3.0 introduces tools to make tiles more maintainable across
templating technologies, including a stable (hopefully) API for
rendering requests and automatic tag generation. Otherwise, it's
basically the same as 2.2.
One objective I have for 3.1 is to complete independence from
servlets. On a longer term, I'd like to try and introduce some cache
management features to support some extra use cases and optimizations.
Indeed I'm starting to think of tiles as an IoC framework for
template-oriented programming.
What are your plans for Tiles?
* Promotion
It has been a long time without announce on the users ML; perhaps the
beta release will draw the attention of new users and/or developers.
We have an open issue with Spring for interfacing with tiles-3.
Perhaps it's time to update it, a good way to get the attention of the
spring community. Do we have a similar relationship with other projects?
Struts perhaps?
And finally I'm thinking of way to demonstrate and promote best
practices with Tiles. We had the showcase but it is difficult to keep it
up to date; perhaps a blog would make it easier for us, and at the same
time more accessible to inexperienced users.
Nick.
