The Next Release of UltraLightClient: What to expect in 2008?
UltraLightClient (ULC) is a development library for creating Rich Internet Applications, developed and maintained by Canoo. It is used to create robust and scalable web applications for the intranet, extranet, and internet. Knowledge workers – that use web applications on a daily basis and for extended periods of time – profit from better interfaces built with UltraLightClient.
Here are some questions I asked Daniel Grob, the technical lead of the UltraLightClient team, regarding the team’s plans:
SW> What is planned for 2008?
We will continue to publish a maintenance release every 3 to 4 months. Maintenance releases contain minor bug fixes and feature requests. It is our policy to fix all minor issues reported to the support mailing lists in the next maintenance release. This means that maintenance releases are driven by the support mailing lists and that your posts on the support mailing lists have a great impact on the next maintenance release. So keep on posting!
We plan to bring out one major release per year. And the topic of the major release for 2008 is all about productivity, productivity, and productivity.
SW> What can developers expect in this release?
UltraLightClient provides a very easy architecture for your Rich Internet Application, it does not enforce a client-server split on your application like most other RIA libraries do. From an architectural point of view, UltraLightClient applications are easier and faster to develop. But we learned from our customers that when building an UltraLightClient application you often need to build some initial application-independent, higher-level components like a form component or a sorted table. These missing high-level components somewhat mask the architectural benefit. You gain because of the easy architecture but you lose some of this gain because of the missing high-level components. In the major release for 2008 we want to address this issue. UltraLightClient will start to provide more than the basic components, such as buttons or text fields, and offer easy-to-use high-level components like a form component or a sorted table as well. This means your application developer team will not need to build high-level components themselves. They can just use the ones that are part of UltraLightClient and be productive from day one.
SW> In October 2007 the UltraLightClient team posted a questionnaire on the product website, asking customers for feedback on the Canoo RIA library. What happened to that feedback?
First, there was a draw and one lucky guy won an iPod Touch!
The support mailing lists are a good source for maintenance release. However we feel that for innovations the postings on the support mailing lists are not adequate because they discuss minor issues in the current product. Support postings focus on the existing product. That is why we did the questionnaire last year: to get feedback for our major releases. And the questionnaire really gave us good feedback about what innovation our customers want to see in UltraLightClient. This feedback poured into our UltraLightClient 2008 release content: productivity, productivity, productivity.
SW> Where can ULC developers find more information on the roadmap, the bugs that will be fixed, the release plan?
Where planning is concerned we are quite open. We do not hide information from our customers. Our main planning tool is JIRA and customers can look at the release plans and the state of the releases in development in our JIRA road map.
If you like to get more aggregated information you can subscribe to the news mailing list. In the news mailing list we inform about releases and about upcoming events.
And we will start to do regular posts on this blog to keep you up-to-date on the latest development on UltraLightClient. So subscribe to this RSS feed to stay tuned.
