is now
I'm done for the day writing offers so I figured I might as well write a little blog post on what keeps a good deal of Outerthought ticking these days... Kauri, that is. Kauri is our take at "holistic web application development", a posh way to say that we feel most other frameworks out there only cater for part of the problem.
While the idea of establishing our own webapp development tool chest has been -erm- frustrating us for more than a year now, it's been only since one proper month that we were able to pull together an actual team and get things going. There's four of us working on Kauri full-time these days, and we expect an alpha release somewhere in May. A lot of what we have been doing until now is design and selection.
Yes, selection, as we won't be building everything from scratch, but try to re-use useful stuff where applicable. On the current re-use list are sitting:
Other obvious re-use items will be Maven 2 and Spring. On the let's-do-this-ourselves-list are sitting the Kauri runtime and the Kauri template language.
We take the selection process pretty seriously. Here's Ives reviewing the browser/Javascript frameworks out there, and Jeroen's take on what the ideal template language for Kauri should do. As you see, we are trying to document the inception process as good as possible, to be able to sanity-check our thinking along the way, as a seed for documentation, but also hoping to tease developers into early contributions or comments - hence why we've already established a Kauri Google group as well. So if you'd like to discuss Kauri with us, sign up there.
Bruno is currently working on the Kauri runtime, the little runtime environment that'll sit underneath every Kauri-based website, and Marc is the jockey trying to shepherd all this energy into one direction. Which is going along just nicely, must I say.
I realize the "Why?" question hasn't been addressed yet. We have a vision document on the Wiki which lists some of Kauri's core values, and I'll help Marc and Bruno to create some teaser material in the forthcoming time. There's more reason to "Why?" than "Just because we can!" obviously, so we'll try hard to get that message across to our target audience: the Java architect responsible for selecting a framework to accommodate team-based web application development.
One of the reasons we started Kauri is our firm belief that a lot of half-baked stuff is available for exceptional developers. Unfortunately, "exceptional" is not what makes the Gaussian curve, well, curb, so we like to see Kauri evolve into something that is attractive and useful for all project participants, for all steps in the process, for all versions of the project deliverables, providing something for all tiers of modern (web) applications.
So if that tickles your brain, come and chat with us!