Hi, Moving some off list discussions about Futon.Next onto the dev list. I'll let others summarise their perspectives, lots of good discussion has happened already, I'll try to cover Cloudant's POV.
At Cloudant we're at the beginning of a rewrite of our user interface. We'd like to collaborate with the wider Apache community, but at the same time the tools we will use need to fit into our wider stack and the work be part of wider deliverables. So this is the Cloudant perspective on the new user interface (which would include futon functionality). We have two basic technical requirements; 1. that the new interface is rebrandable - so that we can have Cloudant look and feel, and update that as time progresses, with minimal effort 2. that functionality is pluggable - so that we can remove features we don't support (e.g. config) and easily add ones we have above vanilla CouchDB (e.g. search) and deployed functionality is configurable at "build" time 1. is easy to do if we're building on top of bootstrap, e.g. to first order it's a case of us having cloudant.less. Russell has built a module system on top of backbone layout manager to address 2 and we've got a build system that can package things up and push into couch (or CDN, or static directory) using grunt.js. This means we can build less files, minify js/css and configure functionality by choosing what gets included. We've got a basic database and document viewer built using these tools, and wireframes and some initial code for a view editor. We have 4 people working on this at various effort levels and are happy to open this up to Apache for review/inclusion. I think we need to clean some things up but could have something for you guys to look at in a week or so. Cheers Simon
