The week was pretty action packed on the development front. We have made some great progress in our new serialized Qooxdoo interface efforts. We knocked-off some of the major items on our v3.0 Punchlist and are continuing to forge our way towards a feature complete version soon.

The new layout engine for Akorn along with the serialized interface is enabling significantly more freedom in interface design. We are basically freeing the designer of any artificial design constraints with regards to layout and Qooxdoo widget usage. Besides the obvious challenge of building the client side architecture, we have also faced challenges designing the server side engine to properly interpret the layouts and populate needed data where necessary for rendering.

One of the amazing side benefits of this effort is the refactoring of code. In true coding elegance we are now providing far greater functionality with significantly less code. It's really shaping up as thing of beauty.

We are heading off to PyCamp next week in Toronto to get a jump-start on our Python development efforts. We decided it would be worth the time to immerse ourselves in Python for a week and be able to ask some “experts” how to do some of the more complicated things we need to do with Akorn.

The plan is to finish up the client interface (finish==feature complete) and then move to the conversion/ re-factoring of the Akorn server-side code. We will keep the existing PHP based Akorn as version 3.x and the new Python based version will begin our version 4.0 release. We are pretty excited about the move to Python but we know it will be a lot of work to get back to the starting line.