Reef Project Announcement

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

On behalf of the services engineering team at Eazel, I'd like to
announce Reef, our next-generation architecture for delivering online
services.

It is based around the concept of Service View Bundles (SVBs),
downloadable self-contained bundles of script code, images, and other
resources (for example html or glade files). The Reef/SVB idea is a
about making it possible to deliver "live content" over the network,
creating a platform for web services that are easier to deploy than
compiled native code, but richer than HTML.

Our current primary target language is Python, but multi-language
support is in the works. For communication back to the server, we will
be working with both XML-RPC and SOAP, since they each have their
advantages and disadvantages. We will also be watching the nascent XML
Protocol working group of the W3C closely.

We're doing all development out in the open on GNOME cvs, and we are
doiung our best to do design discussion in the open, on our public
mailing list and IRC channel.

We'd like Reef to be a true community project, open to anyone who
would find cross-platform, downloadable UI useful for web services or
other applications, and we invite outside involvement.

Resources if you'd like to find out more, or maybe even join in:

* IRC channel #reef on GimpNet

* The reef-list mailing list; you can subscribe at 
  http://lists.eazel.com/mailman/listinfo/reef-list

* The `reef' module in gnome cvs

-- 
Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>
Eazel, Inc.