Roadmap

For a task-oriented view of the Helma NG roadmap see the github issue tracker.

The next Helma NG release is 0.4. No release date has been set so far. We should probably look for a release in q4 2009.

Some tentative goals for the 0.4 release:

• Support for more future ServerJS APIs and modules such as system, file, binary.
• Make Narwhal run on Helma NG (again)
• JSDoc generated API documentation for modules and apps
• Ability to run Helma NG as service on Debian/Ubuntu
• Ability to run untrusted code in Helma NG
• Impvored documentation and tutorials

Areas of work

• Filesystem:
  • duality of (commonjs) file and helma/file. Consolidate file, eventually bring over useful extra stuff from helma/file.
  • commonjs file module is incomplete and not up-to-date
  • jruby libraries for POSIX support need more work, documentation, sort out license issues etc
• HTTP client:
  • Transition to commonjs io, binary support instead of java APIs
  • Maybe switch to Jetty HTTP Client, enabling support for asynchronous requests
  • Related issues: http://github.com/hns/helma-ng/issues/#issue/27, http://github.com/hns/helma-ng/issues/#issue/29
• String extensions:
  • Maybe move all validation functionality (isEmail, etc) out of String.prototype into a separate validation module
• Command line tools: In addition to the generic bin/helma command, more special purpose commands/scripts might be useful:
  • helma-web - run a helma web application
  • helma-admin - run a helma admin script
  • helma-doc - run the helma jsdoc processor
  • more?
• Webapp
  • "continuation" support (helma/webapp/continuation): This was originally meant to use acutal JS continuations, then was watered down into a sort multi-page session framework. Do we really need this?
  • session support: currently, it's based on servlet session API. Do we need/want a pure commonjs implementation?