roadmap 1.1

status: this is the (very early) draft roadmap for rapple 1.1. requests for new features and/or bug reports should be made known to the development team and will be considered for this or future releases.

focus: performance and stability of 1.0 codebase, completion of deferred out items from 1.0 and new features.

1. target platforms

rapple is targetted at the following platforms:

1. Linux (2.x kernels)
2. FreeBSD (4-RELEASE and 5-RELEASE branches)

note a: it is anticipated that rapple will also compile and function on other *NIX variants (e.g., Solaris 8+, OpenBSD 3.x etc.) but this claim has not been extensively tested. if you wish to become involved in such testing then please get in touch with me.

2. deferred out activities (from release 1.0)

the focus of the first release was the delivery of stable code that provides an interesting set of functionality that is likely to have wide appeal. the following items were deferred out from release 1.0 pending further discussion:

1. rss feeds rss is a news syndication format and this activity concerns the generation of basic rss feeds following a site build. the current thinking is to generate site summaries (ordered by date with digest summary content) using the RSS 2.0 format.
2. berkeley datastore as an alternative to using the filesystem datastore a BDB datastore should be supported. this also requires the abstraction of the data access functions (currently based on the filesystem.)

3. performance and quality

in release 1.0 work had begun to improve code performance (e.g., sorting out memory leaks and code profiling etc.) there is still much to do here though the task has been made easier now that the design internals have been agreed:

1. memory management analysis of code for memory leaks and introduction of mechanisms to eliminate or reduce them (Valgrind).
2. code profiling identification of bottlenecks in the code and selected optimistaions ((g)prof)
3. unit testing the unit test framework has been in place since release 1.0 and already covers several modules. there remains a few modules that require coverage and new development will also need unit test cases. this activity ensures that ongoing testing can be automated and that regression errors can be captured early on in the development cycle.
4. documentation source code documentation using Doxygen is already extensive and this activity calls for its continued practice particularly in light of plans to release a library version of rapple.

4. features

1. librapple work had commenced in 1.0 to agree function naming conventions for a future library version of rapple. this activity concerns library safety issues and interfaces and includes sample clients (e.g., the rapple CLI) and documentation for developers.
2. PHP API the high level functions of the rapple could be made accessible to PHP (and potentially other languages) via the use of code wrapper generation tools (e.g., SWIG.)
3. pdf generation possible use of xmlroff (xmlroff.sourceforge.net) as a C based XSLFO processor.

A. references

1. roadmap 1.0 rapple 1.0 was released on 27.11.05 and was based on the roadmap 1.0.