First off, I really hope so, tough at the same time I see the reasons for it. Moreover
I have been trying to contribute back to the community by giving knowledge that could hopefully
cut the rough edges that I’ve met on my way of learning and employing CherryPy [1]. And when
CherryPy is calling, I have something to say.
This article is my consideration in reply to the holiday post [2] by Sylvain Hellegouarch
in CherryPy user group about its current state and future, which recalls to older big
discussion [3] about the status of development of CherryPy.
Initially, this post was meant to be an open letter to Martin Wittemann, an urge to do not break the only
robust and consistent JavaScript development environment, in sense of bug #8618 [1]. How robust and
consistent? Most importantly it is about:
- Code structure: modern feature-rich object model with properties, events, interfaces, mixins and more,
namespace tree, data-binding,
- Dependency management: automatic and transparent dependency resolution, component packaging,
- Deployment: code optimisation, single- and multi-part builds,
- Standard library: i18n, CLDR, high level BOM API, normalised events, normalised ECMAScript, test
infrastructure, API documentation, feature detection.
All this comes out-of-the-box, builds layer on layer, is seamlessly integrated and handed to an end developer
on a silver platter. The codebase is one of the best quality I have ever seen. It is readable,
comprehensible, possible to extend, and is a huge a knowledge resource per se. And note, I am talking about
tools and environment, not UI. Like former Qooxdoo developer, Fabian Jakobs, stated in one of his
presentations [2]:
Don’t just look at the widgets, look at the development tools as well.
Luckily, as was recently stated in Website fundamentals: next challenges [3], the “next” (branch and then a
separate repo [4]; later referenced Next) turned out to be a experimental website-oriented fork of Qooxdoo,
which doesn’t mean to be merged back to Qooxdoo. At least any time soon. Panic is soothed, impending doom
doesn’t overhang the good times. It’s time to dissect and discuss.