[announcement] W3C Annotea development moving to Mozilla

Hello,

Just a quick announcement to say that we're preparing to move
our Annotea developments from Amaya to Mozilla. 

Amaya has been a good platform for quickly developing and
testing our Annotea technologies. Furthermore, having the
Amaya team at hand and knowing the code well has greatly
simplified adding enhancements to it. 

On the other hand, Mozilla has a much bigger user database than
Amaya has. Although developing in Mozilla will probably be
harder than continue doing it in Amaya because of lack of
documentation and experience, we have decided that the benefits
of having more people profit from our work are worth it.

Amaya will continue to be developed as usual. However, the Annotea
team will stop supporting its annotea related code.  Contributors 
interested in taking over from us are welcome to contact the 
Amaya team. 

Amaya already supports both shared annotations and bookmarks. The 
shared bookmarks code is only active in Unix systems and will be 
available on other platforms once the Amaya team finishes its 
adoption of Wx Widgets. We didn't want to spend time writing a native 
Win32 UI interface for bookmarks as it would have been scratched a 
couple of months later on.

Our immediate goal is to write code that supports our shared
bookmark proposal in Mozilla. Rather than spend time writing
code that only works inside Mozilla, our idea is to write a 
library, libAnnotea, that handles the common bookmark operations
and have a module inside this library that provides the 
Mozilla UI. [1] shows a draft of the proposed architecture. The
motivation is to have a library that can be used by other applications,
not just Mozilla, to ease the deployment of shared bookmarks.

Of course, libAnnotea is the ideal goal. What we actually achieve will
depend on time and our development resources.

If you would like to contribute to this open-source effort, feel 
free to contact us.

Cheers,

-jose, Amaya (past) and Mozilla (future) Annotea client developer
at W3C.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/Papers/libannotea/architecture.png

Received on Friday, 4 June 2004 10:56:47 UTC