Hi All,
I take it, that most of you know me, but for those of you that don’t know me I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself.
My name is Guy Peled and I started working on the idea of Visual WebGui a few years ago. I was an architect in several companies that the common agenda of all of them was the creation of applications over the web rather than plain sites. Visual WebGui was the result of my frustration from the way we develop web application. So to make a long story short I wrote most of the core infrastructure of Visual WebGui and today I am the founder and the architect behind Gizmox.
I am reviving this blog to provide you guys the ability to get a head start on what I am working on and through this blog to allow you guys, a quick way to influence how Visual WebGui will look like. Through this blog I will communicate both new directions and existing issues, which I hope will provide you a tool to get ready for future changes or enhancements and a better understanding of the limitations / challenges we are facing.
The way we in Gizmox are managing the development and the way we interact with our customers / community is as I see it unique and provides real challenges. We are doing something that mostly is done by companies like IBM, Adobe and Microsoft, which is to create a general purpose platform for developers. I think Visual WebGui is one of the most ambitious platform available today for developing web applications and as such has challenges that can only be met with a large vibrate community like you guys provide.
The way we work and this blog is an extension of our strategy is to have you in on the development of Visual WebGui and have you exposed to all our challenges. This surly provides allot of challenges for us, as we cannot act perfect as other companies, which do not expose their entire development and issue tracking. That is something that I think you guys should look as a comforting strategy rather than a worrying one, because it provides you guys with the ability to know your exact challenges rather than being surprised.
That said I personally have started to manage the issue tracker and you might have seen that massive changes and reordering that I am doing . To truly provide a comforting tool, it needs to be communicated as a strategic road map rather than a bunch of issues.
So aside from managing issues, it provides me with a tool to see where are the soft spots and where an architectural solution is required. So to complete the support and to provide you with a quick adapting and improving platform I will communicate my thoughts, challenges and development directions here. This will provide a tool for us to work together and for you to be prepared or influence where needed.
The way things will work in this blog is that I will open threads on various subjects and provide you guys with the ability to express yourself regarding these issues. You will not be able to open threads as I would like to keep this forum as informative as possible. I do read and am informed by the Gizmox support team about things that are going in other forums so that might be a way to interact not based on the subjects I will raise here. I would like to keep the interaction based on the thread so they will be as informative as possible, so if you have semi related comments please express them in the other forums and I promise to look at.
I will start the first thread today about something that might affect us all, which is currently under the codename of “theme designer/control designer”. This is a new ability which I hope will enable you guys to gradually break the limitations you got relating to client side appearance and behaviors. This is something I am working on which should be previewed in the next few weeks through a preview version of 6.4.
I know you guys have concerns regarding the stability of the platform and specifically to the open issues and I will write about various subjects that might shed light on where we are heading in terms of stability. I am still gathering information and analyzing it and I will communicate my thoughts, directions and solutions soon. I think that it will provide you with a better understanding of the internals and in term comfort in the stability of future releases. In my experience, and I have allot of a experience in infrastructural development, there is a repetitive process of growing and optimizing which lets the infrastructure adapt to its real world needs and currently I am looking at exactly that.
Fixing issues is good to the point where one should look at common issues or issue families and provide better infrastructural support for those issues. That is exactly the process I am working on with the development team here at Gizmox, which is to categorize issues and provide a better infrastructural support.
Thank you for your attention and hope to see you participating