[Bese-devel] UCW: The Future.

[Drew Crampsie]

Hello UCW users/developers,

The UCW project has been without direction for quite a while now.
We've got one of the most advanced web application development
environments out there, but it's not used widely, unstable,
underdocumented and a bit of a mess. In order to alleviate this
situation, and to bring UCW into the mainstream lisp web world, I've
volunteered to step in as maintainer/visionary.

I'd like to find out who's using UCW, how they are using it, what
versions they are using (-dev, -ajax, -something-else) and what they'd
like to see happen to the project. I'm going to be very aggressive in
following a few ideals/guidlines for UCW that should make it more
widely usable.

1) No arbitrary breaking. The test suite will be run and its results
included in every commit message. the API will not change drastically
all the time. Libraries will not be added/removed without taking steps
to make sure things work. A buildbot will be setup. UCW will become a
lot more professional.

2) No reader macros, defclass*, cl-def or other 'syntax' will be used
in the base library.

3) An effort will be made to maintain a coding style consistent with
that of the larger lisp community, as well as internally consistent.

4) documentation will be written, and maintained. Now new features
will be added unless documented and tested.

5) modularization will be more explicit. I added a patch a while ago
to allow a more 'plugin' like architecture, and this will be
exploited. component libraries, form libraries etc will not be part of
UCW proper as there are many possible implementations. Rather, a good
flexible modular architecture will let the user choose to mix and
match higher level code, be it Lisp-on-Lines, ucw-ajax, or
what-have-you.

6) Javascript will _not_be required, but will be well supported. A
'simple' set of ucw operators will be introduced and used for the
examples and documentation.

I have great plans for UCW over the next couple months. I'd like to
ask everybody who reads this to chime in now and say your piece...
lets make UCW the poster-boy for lisp web frameworks!

Cheers,

drewc