There is a lot going on in the Direct Web Remoting (DWR) world. First and foremost is DWR joining the Dojo Foundation, and secondly is that Joe Walker, creator of DWR, has joined SitePen, Ltd. as Director of Support and Development.
For DWR users, the move to the Dojo Foundation might cause some anxiety as to the future of the project. Alex Russel has the same concerns, and has reassured the community with the following comment:
As far as features go, the planned 2.1 version will be skipped:
For DWR users, the move to the Dojo Foundation might cause some anxiety as to the future of the project. Alex Russel has the same concerns, and has reassured the community with the following comment:
I’ve been concerned a bit that it may appear as though Joe joining SitePen may carry with it the perception that the Dojo Foundation is an arm of SitePen in some way or that DWR will now need to become Dojo-centric. Luckily neither is the case, although reading assurances to that effect on this blog should be taken with a grain of salt. The Foundation has an open door for deserving projects which need a good legal umbrella and don’t want a lot of process or formality, and we’ve extended personal invitations to many non-Dojo-centric projects over the years to join (including direct competitors).The move to the Dojo Foundation is progressing, but will not be immediate. Along with the code itself, there are also a whole set of organization issues to consider:
- Moving the website to directwebremoting.org
- Chasing down CLAs, and using a foundation CLA rather than a Getahead CLA
- Getting lawyers to create a CLA so Getahead can grant rights to the Dojo Foundation (or something similar)
- Get someone to pony up and let us move to SVN
- Providing Unit tests
Further reinforcing the relationship between the Dojo foundation and DWR is Joe's new position at SitePen. Along with SitePen's support of DWR by employing Joe to work full time with DWR, is that there will now be commercial support and services offerings around DWR.
As far as features go, the planned 2.1 version will be skipped:
DWR 2.0 has been out for 6 months or so. At the time, I swore that the next release would be a small one, called 2.1. However it appears that I’m not good at swearing because there is lots in the next release - I think we’re going to have to call it 3.0.So what's in DWR 3.0?
We're doing some Pub/Sub work, so DWR can be a Hub which can be used on it's own or plugged into JMS on the server-side or the OpenAjax Hub on the client. We're allowing file upload/download and some image management over DWR and adding support for JSONP and the Bayeux protocol. Another really cool feature is fairly complete version of the TIBCO GI API as a reverse ajax proxy, and I'm hoping that we can get Gears support for automatic off-line support and maybe to allow transactional remote calls. I'll be blogging about all this in more detail in a few days over at http://getahead.org/blog/joe.