Jigsaw 2.0 !

Hi,

As has been mentioned in various previous mailed, I am about to start
working on Jigsaw 2.0. 

We had a very interesting workshop at www6 on object oriented web
servers, which have lead to lots of discussion about the design of
Jigsaw. 

In these discussions it appeared to me that:
a) We now have more than a year of experience with the current version
   of Jigsaw,
b) Java has changed a lot in a year (1.1 available)

On the first point, I would like to mention that since its first
release (a year ago), Jigsaw has only "grow", and hasn't undergone any
cleanup. This has hurt in various ways, as you might have seen on
the list, and has lead to some part of the APIs under or badly
specified.

On the second point, we did realize during the workshop that Jigsaw
resources ought to be javaBeans. I have already spent some time on
these beans, and I am nearlyt convinced that the whole "resource
object model" should be built on top of that. Think of resources
duplicating some of the functionalities provided by beans
(persistency, attributes, etc)

Now, don't be too scared:
- The design is to remain constant (it's really more a cleanup than a
  redesign). In particular, those of you who have spent time
  understanding Jigsaw will be familiar with Jigsaw 2.0
- This next release has to be out before a three month time frame
  period (I will probably be able to distribute "alpha" version within
  a month)
- Jigsaw is yours ! If you have comments, ideas whatever else let me
  know, I will probably start by writing pages about what this new
  design that should be use as a starting point for discussions

One of the benefits I would like to get from that redesign is the
ability to have resources run under a generic servlet (to be provided
with Jigsaw). This means, basically, that if you have a resource and a
servlet-able server, you should get some fun ;-)

More on that latter,
Anselm.

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 03:37:55 UTC