[Windmill-dev] Direction of the project and plans for 0.4

[Mikeal Rogers]

I had a couple big emails that replied to the recent thread but I  
decided instead to delete them and start fresh.

The project has come a long way, and every time we get over one hurdle  
and see some adoption everyone starts clamoring to add new features  
and bring in more users and add complexity.

Here is the situation we're in.

- We have limited contributors with limited time.
- We have a couple large holes in our functionality that we all need  
plugged.
- We have a large list of features that we consider for whatever  
reason to be "barriers to adoption".

Right now we have a lot of solid functionality, the windmill  
controller API is particularly nice and far above what anyone else  
currently has in competing products. We can't let that cloud the fact  
that we still have a long way to go.

We have a series of half done features and a lot of areas that need re- 
factoring in order to increase the long term maintainability of the  
project. This is what we need to focus on _now_, because it's  
something that is much harder to get done the more we add complexity.

We're seeing some great users coming by, yes they are "tech-savy" but  
to be frank, we can't feasibly support people who aren't right now.  
These are the kinds of users we should have at this stage, and should  
try to appeal to more instead of going after people with less  
experience that will require more support.

In all honestly, this project can't sustain the work it will take to  
support a large "non-tech-savy" user base. We need to focus on  
appealing to more potential contributors, in other words "tech-savy"  
people, to make the projects sustainable. For this purpose it's  
important to focus on the Python and JavaScript related features, as  
the JSON format is targeted at non-developers.

Here is what I would like to see for 0.4;

1. Completing JavaScript test authoring.
	We cannot defer this work. Currently there are zero unit tests  
checked in for this, there is zero continuous integration support, and  
zero XMLRPC support for this framework. This work has to happen now,  
if we're going to have 3 supported authoring paths then they need to  
be in and continually supported. I would like Adam to take on portions  
of this from mde if at all possible.
2. wxWindmill Alpha for Windows.
	There are several caveats. Windows ONLY, we will not produce binaries  
for platforms other than windows. We will create the infrastructure to  
host and create new builds but we won't be pushing new binary bits for  
every bugfix release. And most importantly, wxWindmill will be moved  
out of the primary windmill module in to, more or less, it's own  
project, in the windmill trunk.
3. Improved XMLRPC Support.
	The largest barrier for people creating new language libraries is the  
XMLRPC support. It's also made features in windmill hard to develop as  
all the tests have moved to being XMLRPC based.
4. IDE UI re-arch.
	I've heard Adam grumble about this saying it's in need of some  
refactoring. We're adding new stuff all the time and if the  
architecture becomes a bottle neck this will be very problematic.

Notice that, other than XMLRPC, none of the external API's are  
changing. There are no new features in this list, just solidifying  
things we're had for a while. There are no features directly pointed  
at end-user adoption. The wxWindmill work is also targetted at  
windmill supporting itself more like an importable python module, with  
greater facilities for re-use to encourage adoption in other projects/ 
frameworks.

-Mikeal