webclient: planning update
This message intends to convey recent webclient news and
future webclient plans.
News
I have submitted a paper for consideration in the next WWW
conference about webclient. If you want to take a look at the
paper, please visit
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/blackwood/webclient/www9/webclient.html.
I recently discovered that webclient hasn't worked on Solaris
since I integrated the change to fix "Registry Location" bug.
We need to stay on top of testing on all platforms after this
next webclient milestone release (see the planning section) to
prevent this from happening again. Mark Lin is working hard
to get webclient available on Solaris once again.
I've got some student programmers at the University of
Illinois studet ACM chapter interested in providing an IE
based implementation of webclient. They'll start working once
the infrastructure to allow different browser implementations
is in place (see the planning section, below).
We have an UNO based prototype. It's no longer current with
the latest webclient, but doing the work was more a release
engineering task than anything else. It won't be difficult to
bring the UNO demo up to speed if necessary. This demo is
simply the existing webclient implementation, with an UNO
layer inserted.
Planning
Here are some of the webclient tasks on the horizon.
Webclient M2
Get webclient working on solaris, win32, and linux, then make
a milestone release (webclient M2) of it with Mozilla M12.
Webclient M2 will include: a fix for the "Focus Grab" bug on
Unix, and the necessary infrastructure for external developers
to wrap additional browsers. I would love to include the
wrapped hotjava work that was done by Denis Antrushin in
Russia. The task of finding the fix for the "Focus Grab"
problem is currently blocked on the Solaris side. If it turns
out that we can't use Mozilla M12 due to the necessity of
adding some changes to mozilla after M12 is done, then we'll
create and distribute our own mozilla milestone, say M12a. I
think it's important to avoid depending on the absolute latest
mozilla. We may have to figure out some distribution site for
our M12a, but I think it's worth it. The completion date for
webclient M2 depends on how soon Mark can get webclient working
on Solaris.
Spec Activity
I'd like to go through another round of review on the
requirements spec. After that's done, and after webclient M2
is done, I'd like to start the process of bringing webclient
into compliance with the spec.
StarOffice integration
We're waiting for the UDK to be freely available on win32,
Solaris and Linux. Once that's the case, we'll convert
webclient over to using UNO. I intend this work to be done in
concert with the spec compliance work, after the spec review
process is done.
Macintosh work
Currently, we have no resources to get webclient working on
the Mac. Once webclient M2 is out, I'll write up some more
documentation and start soliciting help from the open source
community.
Summary
The current big push is for webclient M2. After that, we'll
move in parallel on several fronts: UNO integration, MSIE
integration, and spec compliance. If the webclient paper gets
accepted for WWW9, I'll update it with the M2 info. I hope to
be able to point to working IE and hotjava support.
