This is not an official release announcement, but just a quick status-update on what we are currently working on to get some feedback from you.
Programming model of IT Mill Toolkit 4 has been very successful - it is easy to create great looking, responsive and maintainable applications using Toolkit. And this is exactly what our customers have been doing lately. And what we have been doing, is listening to our customers on what we could do better.
The top three items on the wish list are:
Open Source
license would be great.- Server-side programming model is great, but there are situations where you would need to add new client-side widgets to the framework. While this is possible, it requires hard-core Ajax development.
Please make writing new components easier
.
Better documentation
.
Open Source
Millstone 1 (2001) and 2 (2002) were commercial, Millstone 3 (2002) was Open Source (LGPL), Ajax Adapter (2005) was a commercial addition to Open Source core, IT Mill Toolkit 4 (2007) is commercial… And
IT Mill Toolkit 5 will be Open Sourced under a liberal license
. Just to make waiting easier, Open Sourcing of IT Mill Toolkit 4 is also planned.
When discussing Open Source, business model must be explained a bit. The core product will be free (no strings attached) and fully useable for commercial purposes. IT Mill sells commercial licenses that include additional tools and services. We also provice wide range of development services to support your product development.
Extending widget set made easy
The rendering model in IT Mill Toolkit 4 was based on painting user interface updates, sent as XML from server, on DOM with rendering methods implemented in JavaScript. From programmers point of view, this is perfect as long as you do not have to extend it. When you do, you must write those rendering methods in JavaScript and to manage all cross-browser problematics by yourself.
In order to make this easier, two problems had to be solved:
Modularize client-side implementation
into user interface widgets with proper lifecycle and provide stable client-side API:s for those components- Somehow
make cross-browser JavaScript development easy
.
After evaluating a long list of options, we ended up with just two: Either develop new client-side JavaScript-based component framework by ourselves or overcome Not Invented Here syndrome and use Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
We did the hard decision and re-wrote all of our client-side with GWT as well as integrated GWT development tools directly into IT Mill Toolkit.
The implications are interesting:
- We have
stable Java API:s for client-side
widgets - Client-side
widget set is easy to extend
in plain Java - Google will do lot of hard work for us resolving cross-browser issues and optimizing performance (for free). Thanks Google!
- All existing
GWT widgets can be easily ported to IT Mill Toolkit
So in the end,
IT Mill Toolkit 5 will combine the best sides of client- and server-side UI programming models
. We have found this programming model wonderful and hope that you will like it too.
Documentation
We decided to bite the bullet and write a proper manual. The first version was already shipped with 4.0.3 and we are stedily improving it all the time. So 5.0 will have a really good set of documentation.
When?
The current plan is to ship 5.0 beta in the November 6. Version 4 will be released as Open Source at the same time
Any comments, ideas or questions?
