Tapestry Board Report - Oct 2007

[Howard Lewis Ship <hl...@gmail.com>]

Organization

  The Tapestry PMC has voted in another new member, Dan Adams, who expects
to concentrate on Tapestry 5 development.

  Howard Lewis Ship finally figured out how to properly administer messages
to the Tapestry private mailing list, which has really streamlined the
process of adding new users.

Tapestry 4.1

  Tapestry 4.1 has continued to stabilize and evolve, with new 4.1.3 release
now available. The upcoming 4.1.4 release should continue to provide more
bug fixes / performance improvements / new components and JavaScript based
widgets.

  It is expected that Tapestry 4 development will continue for some time but
mostly be concentrated around minor improvements and bug fixes - until more
of the core T4 developers have had time to transition over to Tapestry 5.
The Tapestry 5 Ajax features being finalized will accelerate this process.

  OGNL

    The OGNL release cycle has now more or less started to mirror the
Tapestry 4 release cycle, so the same sorts of things have been happening
there as in Tapestry 4. Tons of bug fixes / performance improvements and the
addition of java 5 support (besides one varargs bug) have also silently made
their way in to the last 2.7.1 release of OGNL.

    It was suggested on the Struts dev list a while back that it might be
nice to have OGNL moved in to the ASF to make it easier for more project
developers to participate. It was suggested that the decision would have to
be made by the controllers of OpenSymphony (who currently store the source),
but the idea has merit. Not sure what - if any - other interest there is in
moving OGNL into the ASF, so it looks like that concept is dead in the water
unless someone else more motivated speaks up.

  JavaScript

    Several changes on the way JavaScript is used by Tapestry have been
made. These allow users to integrate their preferred JavaScript/Ajax library
in place of the one provided (Dojo Toolkit).

Tapestry 5

  Tapestry 5 progress is still a bit slow, but has picked up just in the
last couple of weeks, and is expected to return to a reasonably brisk pace
shortly. However, the road map has been extended out as the Ajax features
are still missing (partly from debate over which Ajax framework to embrace).

New Snapshot build / documentation process

  Nightly builds (via a Maven snapshot repository) and documentation (at
http://tapestry.formos.com/nightly/tapestry5) are now available for Tapestry
5. The goal here is to publish snapshot versions of both software and
documentation, so as to keep the main Apache site consistent with the latest
stable releases -- this was getting to be a problem, with documentation on
the main web site "ahead" of the latest non-snapshot releases.

  It is expected that Tapestry 4 will also eventually use this resource as
well.

-- 
Howard M. Lewis Ship
Partner and Senior Architect at Feature50

Creator Apache Tapestry and Apache HiveMind