This is sort of a test message to see who all is here, introduce myself, etc.
I think I probably know most of the people subscribed to this list, for those that don't I am a committer for the XAP project, I've written a fair amount of the initial code that we will commit as soon as our account information is all set up. Once we have committed our initial stuff (including source, some examples, website, etc) I hope that we can start some productive discussions about what it is we are building, critique the code we already have, develop a roadmap past what we already took a stab at, and tackle a lot of specific issues we have already encountered or expect to. The website we set up should have a rough roadmap as well as some information to help kick off directional/technical discussions. It's hard to get much discussion going without any code or published information to look at, but one thing to think about is what UI toolkit we are aiming to support. Our architecture allows us to fairly easily support individual components, and you will see in the initial examples we check in we've mixed some Zimbra, Google and HTML components together. Although out architecture allows individuals to plug in their own tags and components easily we do want to support a standard set out of the box. Writing our own DHTML widget set is probably not a good option, so we are left with choosing some toolkit. Some issues to consider: Can we commit changes/fixes back into the UI toolkit? Does the toolkit support a wide variety of widgets? Does it have the right license? How mature is the toolkit? Some of the toolkits we have considered: Zimbra/Kabuki - This was attractive as Kabuki is an Apache incubator project, which means we can roll back changes into fairly easily and help each other out. However it's not clear what the status of this project is or how much real development is going to take place. Dojo - A pretty well-known and popular toolkit, the widgets are bit uneven right now but the next release is supposed to be the "widget release" and Dojo has a lot of activity and energy. It seems likely we would be able to indirectly (and in time perhaps directly) contribute changes/bug fixes. Yahoo - The widget set here is nice but very limited. GWT - GWT doesn't come with a javascript library, only a Java one. (As far as I know) At this point it doesn't appear to have a lot of functionality and the Java-centric approach doesn't fit too well with what we are doing. Something to keep an eye on? Personally I don't have a lot of experience with any of these toolkits. I have experimented and looked at the code for most of them but I haven't used them for anything major. I would love to hear opinions on any of these toolkits or any others I didn't list here. Even something as simple as "I tried a Yahoo slider once and it was buggy" would be helpful. At this point we are leaning towards Dojo but there is still plenty of time for compelling arguments to be made. James M
