Roadmap
Current Status
Fan is currently in development of its initial 1.0 release. The core language and Java runtime are quite stable. The .NET runtime is almost there, but not quite. At this point, we are building out system APIs for concurrency, database access, and web applications.
Stability
The functionality in each build should be stable. We are very committed to fixing bugs and getting existing code solid before moving on to new features. However Fan is still new, and like all software platforms it still needs to be wrung out in lots of different applications.
We can't promise that we won't make breaking language or API changes. We need the freedom to change things as we learn what does and does not work. However in practice, we've made very few breaking changes over the past year. Be aware of APIs which are still evolving such as concurrency, uri spaces, webapp and javascript support - these are the most likely to change.
New Features
The list of features on our radar for the next year or so (in no particular order):
UriSpaces
The uri space APIs are a work in progress. These APIs and the design will evolve as we plug new implementations into this framework such as HTTP-REST and cloud computing.
Threadlocals
As we start to design libraries and applications with Fan, it is clear that we are relying on thread locals to a much greater extent than in our past lives. Today thread locals are stored in a big map which is ok, but we can do better. The plan is to add support for a threadlocal
keyword which will let you declare thread locals much like you would a static field. With that feature, many APIs can be reworked - for example Weblet can declare req/res as thread locals.
See design proposal
.NET Runtime
Some of the .NET runtime is incomplete:
- We need to get the
sql
APIs working on .NET (if you want to help let us know). - Performance needs to be improved
.NET FFI
Fan includes a Java FFI for seamlessly working with Java libraries. But we still need to implement the .NET FFI. If you would like to help please let us know.
Basic support for SMTP, POP3, and probably IMAP is required. This work will include standardized APIs for modeling multi-part email messages. Current plan is to write these protocols cleanly from scratch rather than wrap something like JavaMail. SMTP is done, still need POP3 and MIME decoding.
Sys APIs
Some of the sys
APIs are imcomplete, such as Regex
.
Web APIs
The web
APIs are incomplete: "http" UriScheme and HTTPS.
Web App
The web application framework is just an early prototype and will be evolving.
Crypto
We need standardized APIs for cryptographic operations and algorithms. This work will include support for the SSL protocol.
IDE Support
We aren't IDE users ourselves, so this isn't our highest priority. But we realize it is a requirement for a successful ecosystem, so we'll be keeping our eye on this one. Help is always welcome.
Web Server Integration
All of our initial work with the web
API has been with our own web server implementation (wisp). Although the plan is to eventually plug the web
API into Java servlet based containers, into IIS, and to have a mod_fan for Apache.
Grouping
Original discussion was on grouping tests, but seems like a way to group pods, types, and slots in a generic way would be valuable for many application: testing, IDE navigation, reflection, etc.
Pod Repositories
Today a Fan environment is a simple flat directory of pods. Eventually we need a more sophisticated solution. See discussion.