Hello Everyone, I have a lot of topics I want to cover, and without wanting to write a whole novel in one email and expedite getting some information to you, I'll have to break this into at least three parts - with the other pieces following over the next few days.
By way of a short disclaimer - the following is my interpretation of what un-folded at the Conference. I may have not remembered or not understood some of the facts precisely, but I hope I get the message across - Witango's future is assured! I apologize to the list - I had promised before the Conference to make an effort to post information as readily as possible, but of course that didn't happen. Let me tell you why. First off, the Conference was 3 days ago but I only just got home because I took an Amtrak Train all the way from Pittsburgh, home to Vancouver BC (about 3,000 miles). And I'll tell you I slept nearly the whole way home I was so exhausted from the Conference. So I apologize again to the list for taking so long to fire this off. I realize of course, Phil and Sophie will be releasing some of this information 'officially' once they get home, but I thought an end user/developer's point of view might be helpful. The moment we began lining up for Registration on Monday afternoon - the fun began. Putting faces to names started in the line-up and quickly became one of the most worth while 'events' of the Conference. How long have many of us chatted together on this list - but never met? How many times in your life do you get to find a long-lost cousin and discover an instant friendship in your kinship? I can only speak for myself of course - but I know I went many times over my allotment in life during the Conference. Now imagine all these cousins together in one big room, not only talking about Witango, but our lives, our families, the long roads of our careers, our travels, our businesses, our futures and you can easily imagine how time escaped us all and most of where negligent in getting information out to the rest of our extended family, you. Please forgive us. We covered an amazing amount of ground in 2 and half days and I for one only slept about 9 hours during this time. So, first off - Phil and Sophie. """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Again, I can't speak for anyone else, but my picture of them was night and day compared to the view I had formed of them from List - to the personal impression they left me with once I finally got to know them a little at the Conference. Prior to the Conference, I simply pictured Phil and Sophie as two business people who had formed a large, successful Web-development Company. And that to them, Business was the name of the game. But when I left the Conference, I realized Phil and Sophie are just people. Very clever people - but people none-the-less. They are funny, personable, warm, sensitive, intelligent and even a little shy. In bits and pieces, they shared with us what they thought they were getting when they purchased Witango - but what they got was something completely different in many, many ways. They thought they bought a product (Tango), but what they got was a community. And they demonstrated to me, that they've taken this sincerely to heart in every way. In addition to being great people, Phil and Sophie have vision. And they have relied heavily on this community to form this vision - and will continue to do so for as long as it takes to achieve this vision. So here are some of the highlights in my own words. The Witango Team """"""""""""""""""""""" In addition to Phil and Sophie, the Team, includes a very important individual: Andre Morozov. He worked for Everyware back at the beginning of Tango and was involved in many critical turning points in it's evolution. He is now the Chief Architect of the Server Engine for both v5.0 and v6.0. His company is called Stone Steps ( http://www.stonesteps.ca ). Obviously I was very impressed with Andre's programming abilities, and he painstakingly walked us all through many intimate details of the Witango Source Code. But what I was most impressed about Andre was with a subject that often does not receive enough credit - bug fixes! Andre demonstrated that he is a dedicated sole that wants more than anything to "get it right". Not only has Andre, and the rest of the Team been working on new features - but they are literally rebuilding and fixing very large chunks of the Source Code in an effort to make expansion easier and to optimize performance. This is one of the reasons why it has taken longer than expected to release a branded version of the Witango Server - but more on that later. Pre-emptive Threading """"""""""""""""""""""""""" And on the subject of optimization, we have Pre-emptive Threading. Andre walked us through the current Witango model of Co-operative Threading and how eventually Witango performance can plateau and encounter a bottle-neck under heavy loads. Pre-emptive Threading utilizes true multi-tasking methods to sustain heavy loads and even increase performance. From what I recall he said, at the current level of development for v5.0, Andre says we are looking at about 4 times increase in performance from normal TAF files. Interacting with a Database can slow this down obviously - but we are still looking at 2 to 3 times a performance increase from what we have now. This is at the current state of development - this figure may increase once v5.0 nears completion. Debugging """"""""""""" V5.0 Includes new debugging features. In addition to the normal Error identifying the Action Position - error messages can now extract the line of code and nested Metatag where the error occurred by way of a Meta Stack Trace, which is a collection of cascaded errors caused by the first error. This array will be available to those of us who write our own custom error messages as well. Andre is working towards identifying the actual line number of the error and we may see line numbering in our Results HTML windows for v5.0 (or v6.0 at the latest, as well a possible new debugging window in the Editor v 6.0). New Variable Scope """"""""""""""""""""""""" In an effort to strengthen the Witango programming model and to aid initial understanding and training of Witango v5.0, a new Scope was introduced to replace Local Scope - it's called Request Scope. Obviously v5.0 will be backward compatible with Local Scope, but Request Scope is more appropriate and descriptive than Local, when you compare Witango against other languages. In other programming languages, Local Scope actually means something quite different than the way we understand it. I think this helps to position Witango more seriously in the world market of other serious languages. New <@DEFINE> Metatag """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" To further expand on the topic of the Witango programming model - v5.0 has the <@DEFINE> Metatag. Other languages require or allow you pre-define variables and their types. This can be an important aid during development and trouble-shooting to ensure, for example, that a variable that should be an Array doesn't accidentally get overwritten as a single value, by causing an error. Use of this Metatag will be optional I understand. The importance of this becomes more apparent when your Witango code is compiled as Java J2EE or .NET :-) New <@EMAIL> Metatags """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Andre showed us how Witango v5.0 can now Retrieve IMAP4 and POP3 mail and provide better supported SMTP mail sending. Basic support for attachments will be in v5.0, with full support following shortly after. WISP """"""" The Witango Server Protocol. From what I gather, Phil and Andre identified early on that they wanted to introduce many new features and capabilities of Witango. But instead of writing add-on modules to the core of the Engine code for every one - they've wrapped the inner heart of the Application Server engine with an API that will allow external 'Clients' (mainly web-server plugins, such as used by IIS and Apache) to cleanly communicate with Witango using a common interface. In v5.0, this API will be made publicly available. The most obvious benefit will be the speed at which Witango Team will be able to crank out compatible versions of the Witango Plugin for just about any version of Web-server on the market. The other obvious benefit, will be to allow independent developers to write their own custom applications that can communicate directly with the Witango Engine. One example would be Web-Services. Web-services (XML style or otherwise) don't actually require a Web-server to facilitate it's functionality. Although you often find Web-servers and Web-Services tied together, it's often only because Web-servers are a pre-made 'Client' for the communication interface for the Service. But if you could by-pass the Web-server (often the slowest piece of linkage in your system) - then you could deliver a more efficient Service by building your own optimized 'Client' with Witango as the heart of Service and your Code as the Brains. Obviously knowledge of Java or C++ are recommend. I understand some code examples for building your own WISP interface will be available in v5.0 Custom Tags """""""""""""""" Phil has put a vast amount of work into cleaning up how Witango Custom Tags are implemented. Not only to make your jobs easier, but because Phil would like you to write Custom Tags for all of us and submit them for inclusion in other upcoming versions of Witango. Your Tags would not be an add-on piece of code - but hard coded at the Source Code level as a permanent addition to Witango. His recommendations, if you would like to contribute, are to make sure you submit your Custom Tag code with a unique name. Final naming of the Tag will be done by the Witango Team, but prefix your submission with your name or initials and use an underscore somewhere in it. Example: <@SCADILLAC_BROWSERSNIFFER> This is because the final release of your Tag may become a compilation of other submissions or features and the new Tag, example <@BROWSER>, then doesn't step on top of your current functionality. This is because hard coded Witango Metatags are always executed before any Custom Tags that happen to have the same name. Part 1 """"""" So, this is my quick wrap-up of some of the v5.0 Server. Part 2 will be more on the v5.0 Server and the Editor (including sharable, searchable Code Snippets, Metatag Attribute helper and integrated Help files) Part 3 is about writing and compiling Witango v6.0 Code for Java J2EE and .NET. As well as my thoughts on Marketing Witango to the world. Again, Phil and Sophie are great people. One of the attributes I admire about them is how closely they've kept their work to themselves. Yes, we've all been starved for information for many, many months and many of us feel they owe us something - your words and posts have not gone unnoticed, but Phil and Sophie are just not the kind of people that want to talk about features or plans until they know they are obtainable. What does that mean? Once Phil and Sophie say something; then you can take it as gospel! And at the first ever Witango Developers Conference - they sang a resounding chores, of which I've only scratched the surface. On top of that, I also sensed there is more they wanted to tell us - but it'll have to wait until they are ready. Also, Thank you to our Host Razzak Memon for supporting Witango whole-heartily and for chewing us out (more on that later) :-) and to all the other Presenters that blew me away with their efforts and creativity and for sharing their experience and insight into business and the Software Industry. And also Thank you to Everyone (present at the Conference and not able to attend) that made me feel personally, that all my efforts to support this community have been completely worth-while. I will continue to strive to honor your praise and thoughtfulness. Thank you. Cheers for now, and I hope this makes up for my tardiness. Scott Cadillac http://xml-extra.net VP, Research and Development Plus International Corp. 604-460-1843 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.plusinternational.com Vancouver, BC, Canada Does your company have an Enterprise Information Portal? Check out Salsa at www.plusinternational.com/flash/salsa.htm ________________________________________________________________________ TO UNSUBSCRIBE: send a plain text/US ASCII email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe witango-talk in the message body
