Soashable Web Application

The Xmpp4Js HACKING file

Soashable is built on the Xmpp4Js library, so its hacking fill will also be useful. http://xmpp4js.sf.net/hacking.html

Why EXTJS 2.0?

The original prototype for Soashable was built using Prototype Window. While the library was reasonable, it wasn't very friendly to customization and had no framework for reusable widgets.

After some exploration, the project came to be build on EXTJS 1.1, which was solid, but had a lot of annoying issues related to creating trees of components. After EXT 2.0 was announced (less than a month later, go figure), I did some preliminary impact assessment, and overall it was a pretty sizable change. So I explored Dojo 1.0.

I was very impressed by Dojo, especially the ability to create widgets out of HTML markup (dojoType=) and bind a javascript class to them for event handling, etc. But in the end, I went ahead with the EXTJS 2.0 upgrade simply because the component code of Xmpp4Js (the bulk of the code at the time) required almost no change. Even though Soashable itself required considerable change to UI components, it was less work overall. Dojo would have worked great, but a value judgement was made to go the path that required the least work, since neither framework provided a killer feature over the other.

Why Maven? Isn't that for Java projects?

Maven was originally meant to build Java artifacts, but thanks to the flexible design it can now handle a wide range of languages, including Javascript. It is ideal because it handles dependencies, versioning, automated testing, documentation and report generation, and deployment. It does this in such a way that old builds are reproducable, getting a new workspace setup is simple, and new builds are able to happen in a continuous integration environment like Cruise Control.

Ant is capable of offering these benefits, but I was not interested in rolling my own build system (and maintaining it!) when Maven does exactly what I need.

Why Open Source?

The value that this project provides isn't its source code. The more people adopt this platform, the more valuable it becomes for everyone. That can translate into at least as many dollars for me as if it were proprietary. I'm not too worried about 'rogue' companies building closed networks on the platform, because there is plenty of market share to go around and that only makes it bigger.