Hello everyone

[James Margaris <jm...@nexaweb.com>]

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