Christian Trimble recently sent to the list details of the XChain project (see<http://xiantrimble.com/xchain/> and<https://github.com/ctrimble/xchain> ) and pondered on whether aspects of this could be accommodated in commons-chain. There has not been any response to this email (apologies to Christian), but it does raise an interesting question about where does the wider community want commons-chain to go.
Simone Tripodi summarised his view of the 2.0 release recently, with it consisting of: * Support for same features of 1.x * Increased modularisation * Use of generics * A Fluent API (EDSL) * Web support * Increase number of supported formats for external chain configuration (add JSON, YAML etc.. to the current support for XML) As things stand, all of the above have been implemented apart from the support for additional files formats (defined in CHAIN-76), although more testing and samples are required. Christians links point to an interesting, if very specific use of chains : XChain fuses the commons-chain and JXPath projects, and there may be merit in the creation of a module/component to accommodate this in chains. Whether this should be in a 2.0 release needs to be discussed, however, I would favour the following happening with Chain: 1. Move CHAIN-76 to another release (2.1?) – I am not aware of any great demand for this functionality 2. Make a 2.0 release candidate of the SVN trunk as is and move towards a substantial test phase. This would have the merit of ensuring much of the recent great work from Simone and others goes out into the wider world and hopefully kick-starts interest in commons-chain. Of course, if the response is minimal, then perhaps we should reduce effort in commons-chain as is, although this is a wider community decision. Look forward to hearing opinions on this. Regards, Steve Westwood
