Fellow Enhydra
users,
It has been almost 9
months since Enhydra.org was created
and the feedback,
contributions and support have been
fantastic. Thank
you!
What is clear is that Enhydra
solves real world problems,
is able to scale to millions of hits per day
(recently
another high-profile,
high-traffic site has been
added to
the list of Enhydra success stories - announcement
soon) and
has many unique features including the
very popular
XMLC
tool set. What is also important is that we
don't rest on
our laurels and continue to make Enhydra the best
Open
Source Application
server for Web development.
In fact
to establish Enhydra
as the "Apache of
Application Servers".
So what's next?
That's a question that we
have been contemplating here for the
last couple of months. We
have also been discussing options
with other Open Source
projects and have put together an exciting
roadmap covering the next 3
months.
The purpose of this mailing is to solicit feedback and
generate
a discussion around the
approach. We would also like to solicit
as much help as possible - we
here at Lutris have day jobs
too ;-)
Many of the initiatives
mentioned here are well under way with
semi complete prototypes -
it's just a matter of ensuring
that the quality of Enhydra
does not suffer from releasing
enhancements prematurely. So
here is the proposed roadmap:
Enhydra
v2.3
============
This release will be made very soon.
Major features:
* A
slightly restructured tree layout to make integration of
other source bases
easier.
* Improved build rules to avoid unnecessary build errors
when
not building all the
features.
* Re-integration of the XMLC code with the main Enhydra
code
(Sorry again for all
the confusion on the XMLC license issues).
* A much improved XMLC! It now
integrates HTMLTidy, so
ill-formed HTML is
"fixed" prior to compilation. Many other
fixes have been
made.
* HTTPS support by the multiserver! Of course you need to
have
a SSL library handy,
but we have tested with a couple of
the free ones out
there.
* A few much needed DODS fixes. Need I say more?
* A bug-tracking
tool added to Enhydra.org.
Enhydra
v2.4
============
In the not-to-distant future, this release will update
the
servlet support of the
multiserver to the very latest
Servlet 2.2 specification.
While Enhydra application do not
necessarily require the
servlet 2.2 features, we are committed
to open standards this will
allow us to leverage other servlets
when writing web
applications. We believe
that the Servlet 2.2
specification is very solid
and the restructure to support
it (and maintain full
backward compatibility i.e. all existing
and future Enhydra
application will run) is well underway.
The major features of this
release planed to be:
* Full Servlet 2.2 implementation.
* NSAPI
connection method. We added an ISAPI connection method
with the last release,
but NSAPI will allow us to have a very
fast connection with
Netscape web servers instead of using
the rather inefficient
WAI protocol.
* Better documentation. We know this has been a little poor
up
to now, but we are
working to combine the submitted materials
and publish better
documentation through Enhydra.org.
* At Lutris we have been using something
called "ROCKS"
(Trivia: It's name
comes from the primary tool of the sea
otter). This is a
layer on top of XMLC. It provides a
methodology and tools
for implementing a web application
event model, easy
handling of CGI parameters and a library
of common web
application tasks (e.g. error checking in
form submissions and
subsequent re-population). We are
very excited about
this technology and believe it to be one
of the most important
additions.
* JSP support? We would like feedback on this. It is
fairly
easy to add, but we
really believe XMLC offers so many
benefits. However, to
support all skills and methodologies
we are considering
including it.
* Better NT support - the ability to run Enhydra as a
NT
service.
* XMLC is extended to compile generic XML. [Useful
for
implementing an XML protocol].
Enhydra
v3.0
============
Now this is where things get really interesting. To
truly be an
alternative to commercial application servers like BEA
Weblogic
or IBM WebSphere, is is clear that we must be in a position
to
leverage standard Java components to quickly build web applications.
To
date, we at Lutris have partnered Enhydra as a server running
the
presentation logic talking to an EJB server running some of the
business
logic. While this works well, there are some circumstances
where it is more
convenient to package this up into one easy to
manage server. We are thus
actively working with other EJB projects
to provide a complete EJB v1.1
engine bundled with Enhydra. An
architecture of this initiative will be
published soon, but in
a nutshell, the EJB services will optional configured
through
a configuration file. This means that Enhydra can still
be
configured to have a very
small footprint (Embedded devices)
and support current Enhydra
applications while offering
the services to support applications with business
logic
written as EJBs. The EJB
integration is not a pipe dream.
We demonstrated an
EJB banking application
running on
Enhydra at the LinuxWorld
on August 10th. This
application,
although a prototype
architecture, also used the
InstantDB
all Java database to
provide persistency. [We
would love
InstantDB to become
Open Source, hint,
hint].
Summary of major
features:
* Full EJB v1.1 support.
* JMS implementation.
* DODS tool
extended to generate EJB entity beans.
* The servlet 2.2 implementation will
also be able to be
configured as an EJB
container giving the ability of
v2.2 servlets (or
Enhydra applications) to be run as EJBs.
* The Admin and Debugging
application will be enhanced to
manage the EJB
services, and distributed applications.
It will also offer a
remote control interface leading
the way to desktop
management applications.
* All configuration files as XML.
Please excuse the length of
this email. I realize that it
will probably raise more
questions than it answers, but we
really would like some
feedback. As a professional services
company Lutris has a good
deal of insight into the problems
of building web application,
and the roadmap mentioned here
is underway, we just want to
make sure that we listen to
all comments and suggestions.
Also, I have been deliberately
vague on actual release dates. With no outside help we
will
have Enhydra v3.0 (full EJB) out in early
Q1 2000, but with
just a little help... The other releases will be this year.
Many thanks and I look
forward to your feedback...
Cheers,
Paul Morgan (CTO Lutris
Technologies, Inc.)
