Jitsu Roadmap

June 2006

Early Access Release: We are releasing Jitsu in June to generate feedback from the community. At this stage, Jitsu is still too unstable for use in a serious project. However, there is plenty of material to enable developers to evaluate it and give it a spin.

We are particularly interested in feedback about syntax, choice of tag names, missing features, performance, cross-browser issues, scripting, integration with other frameworks, as well as overall understandability and complexity.

December 2006

Beta Release: We plan to have a beta release of Jitsu by the end of the year. The Beta release should be stable enough to support application development.

We are working on a number of improvements and fixes for the beta. We welcome feedback and suggestions on this list:

• Localization. A resource system is being fleshed out to support building Jitsu apps where resource definitions can be specified for different languages - so you can build a French or German version of an app by writing a resources-fr.xml or resources-de.xml file. This same mechanism also provide the ability to "theme" your controls, by specifying a set of properties that can be swapped in at compile time.

• The Bundler. During development time, its convenient if the compiler creates lots of smaller files, e.g. one file per control. That way in debuggers like Venkman you can quickly navigate through scripts. At deployment time, you want to bundle up only those those files you need into a single generated JavaScript file. We are working on a bundle system to support that.

• JavaScript 2.0. We are considering making our scripting language be JavaScript 2.0, with a down-compiler that generates JavaScript 1.5 for today's browsers. The main reason to do this is to support getters and setters, so that we can hide the ID system from developers.

• Unit tests. We want a way to write tests that run in a browser and simulate users clicking on buttons, so we can write regression tests.

• XSD Schema generator (for intellisense). The XSD generator in Jitsu markup is currently broken. The generator takes a Jitsu type module and spits out suitable XSD for that module. The main goal is to enable code editors e.g. Visual Studio to offer typing hints as you write Jitsu pages.

• Markup finalization. We're still tweaking the names and shape of the Xml markup.

• More Controls. We are building more controls, including a Grid, a Tree, Splitter, and a DateBox.

• Active Dataset Samples. We plan to add more active dataset examples to show how the front end and back end communicate.

• Keyboard Support and Commands. Still more work is needed on keyboard support and a commanding mechanism.

• CSS Preprocessor. We have started on CSP, a CSS Preprocessor, which lets you add special @ rules to your CSS to handle e.g. browser detection, based-on styles, and server-side constants. The code is in the alpha release but it is undocumented and untested.

• Nested DataSets and DataSet transports. In the alpha release, DataSets are still relatively primative. We are working on support for more complex DataSet structures, e.g. DataSets that contain nested datasets, and multiple DataSets that share a single transport.

• Enhanced Submitters and Validators. Right now, submitters only support property changes. We plan to also support structure changes through submitters.

March 2007

v1.0 Release: Our main goal with the v1.0 release is to create a stable, documented and efficient platform. Areas we are working on include:

• Bug fixes. Finalization on syntax and API.

• Cross-browser work and Performance work.

• Documentation and Samples. In particular, more server examples and more connectors to databases.