[Springframework-rcp-dev] Spring Richclient Status & Future

[Jan H. <jh...@sc...>]

Hi,

As you may know, we had planned to have a Spring Richclient 1.0 release
somewhere at the end of Januari. It's March already and no release has
been pushed out. Don't start to panic just yet, I'll let you in on the
details.

Somewhere in Januari I contacted the people of SpringSource to discuss
the position of Spring Richclient within the Spring universe. As we're
in different parts of the world, it takes some time to schedule a
meeting online and contact the right people, thus time was creeping past
the previously set release date. Our goal with this meetings was to not
only discuss the present and future of the project but also the
involvement of SpringSource. The outcome is the following.

Current codebase:

We have set a new target date for the release: March 17. All bugs should
be fixed while documentation will be provided as needed. We don't want
this to delay the release date anymore and interfere with our future
plans. If documentation is requested at some point, we'll provide this
on the developer blog. This release will have maintenance updates as
requested.

Future plans:

We've decided to start a new codebase and re-brand the project to Spring
Desktop. One of the reasons behind this is the possibility to update the
existing core techniques after some research. The current codebase core
is about two years old, quite stable but not state-of-the-art anymore.
Another reason is that this allows us to start with the modularity in
mind and review the existing codebase. 

We're doing some research in several areas right now and plan to start
with the codebase right after the Spring Richclient 1.0 release. We'll
take advantage of this new start to shift to the SpringSource
infrastructure (svn) as well. The aim is to align Spring Desktop 1.0
(mind the name!)  with the next big Spring release train somewhere in
October.

SpringSource will help us out by providing the infrastructure, being
involved in the defining of the project (scope/roadmap) and devoting
some time for research and coding. They've made it clear that they find
this project to be valuable and want to align it with the future Spring
release.

I hope this clears things up and removes any doubt about where this
project stands and is heading towards.

ps: if you're enchanted by these words don't hesitate to pull up your
sleeves and help us out by sending in patches/documentation or just by
providing us with your feedback at the forum
(http://forum.springframework.org/forumdisplay.php?f=28) or the
developers maillist (spr...@li...).

Kind Regards,
Jan


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