Proposed IntraWeb Roadmap
I made a small post on our private groups, but now I want to open it up to wider discussion. As many of you know I just returned to the IntraWeb development team July 1. Here is what we are currently thinking about for IntraWeb 10 and beyond.
Pre Jello
At this point, everything is up for discussion. See something you don’t like? Don’t worry, nothing has been set in stone yet. I am simply tossing out ideas for discussion. Comments can be posted in any of our forums.
IntraWeb 9.0
The next version will be IntraWeb 10. Normally we would not make such a jump so quickly, but Tiburon is just around the corner. Tiburon supports Unicode strings and this required some core changes to IntraWeb. Maintaining two branches does not make a lot of sense, but there are enough core changes with Tiburon support to change version numbers.
IntraWeb 10.0
Tiburon Support
IntraWeb 10 required some core changes and work to handle the changes in Tiburon regarding Unicode support and Tiburon’s strings.
Unicode Support (Tiburon only)
Initial releases simply support the new string types and basic conversions of the new Unicode strings to and from UTF-8, with UTF-16 and others to be added later.
Silverlight
Silverlight we believe will move into the market very quickly. We plan to add a new Silverlight tab with Silverlight enabled controls for super grids, enhanced edit boxes, tree views and more. Silverlight usage will be completely optional and users will be able to still create HTML 4.0 only applications by simply not using controls from the new Silverlight tab. Initial releases of 10.0 will contain only the core support for using Silverlight controls and minor releases will add individual Silverlight controls.
Super Stabilization
While we feel that the quality of IntraWeb 9 is quite good, every once in a while I like to perform what I call “super stabilization”. After 10’s release the roadmap has been designed that changes and additions should not have large impacts on the core code and bugs can continue to be fixed in core with an emphasis on stability of upgrade compatibility.
jQuery Support
Integration with third-party Javascript library jQuery.
No more IE 4 / 5
Because of the auto update functionality almost no one is still using these versions. There are still a lot of users using IE 6.0. In fact I do not think we currently support IE 4 and 5, but there is still some left over code in IntraWeb and this would be removed.
Supported Environments
In the past we have dropped support for Kylix and have never supported Delphi 8. We would continue to support Delphi 5 and higher for Win32, and C++ Builder 6. However we would like to remove support for the .NET personalities support only .NET 1.1 and only support .NET 2.0 and higher. In reality, any .NET users will most likely want to use 2.0 anwyays.
The proposed support matrix from IntraWeb 10 would be:
LegendSupportedNot Applicable
Unsupported
Win32 .NETDelphi 5
Delphi 6
Delphi 7
Delphi 8
1.1Borland Developer Studio 2005
1.1Borland Developer Studio 2006
1.1RAD Studio 2007 2.0RAD Studio 2009 (Tiburon)
C++ Builder 5
C++ Builder 6
Kylix 1
Kylix 2
Kylix 3
Documentation
We plan to make a major push on the IntraWeb documentation and the open it to user contributions.