Martijn Dashorst wrote:
Can we define some assignments for the Summer of Code? Would be nice to have one or two students work on for example WML, XUL or any other part that we feel to be in for some work?
Summer of Code is great if we can find something nice to do, but I'm not sure WML or XUL are it, to be honest.
Although it's a nice idea to have something well defined to work on like this, do we really need either WML/XUL in Wicket? The existing portlet support doesn't seem to be well used, and provide maintenance headaches, even though it's actually quite close to the standard Web* stuff we have.
WML is pretty much dead for anything other than small sites that sell mobile content or provide simple info. Barely anyone is building complex sites in it - everyone just uses XHTML with appropriate mobile stylesheets.
Let's not try to shoehorn Wicket into WML development when there's not really any demand for it. It will make life harder for no good reason. I suspect the same is true (possibly more so) of XUL.
Please remember that just because you can add features, doesn't mean you should. Look at Netscape in its open source heyday - they started adding every last little feature anyone had a patch for, without stopping to consider if it was actually useful. It's as much about what to leave out as it is what to include. And I think we should leave WML and XUL out.
Alastair
