In the light of Guenter's recent announcement of the roadmap, I would like to us this forum to solicit some feedback on the Web and IO libraries and strategies for further development. Some concrete proposals will come out of this discussion to fill in the Poco 1.4 item in the wiki.
The idea behind IO is to have an abstraction for various I/O ports (serial/parallel/USB...). It also seems logical to have a network port, but that kind of functionality is already in the Net library. And, then, I see a need arising for a Protocol interface that would be fed to ProtocolStream alongside appropriate Port (Protocol and ProtocolStream do not exist in code yet).
Summary of issues regarding IO:
- network port introduction and who is dependent on whom (whether to move Net code in IO - making Net dependent on IO, use existing Net code - making IO dependent on Net or duplicate the code - making IO and Net independent from each other)
- is Port an appropriate name (a NetPort having TCP/UDP port is confusing), or would another name (such as Channel, for example) be more apprpriate
- Protocol and ProtocolStream
As for Web library, the first things I'd like to see are SOAP and HTML support. Some HTML stuff already resides in the Net library, which raises similar issue like the one above with network port.
Alex
P.S. I am speaking exclusively from the open source perspective and may be mising some important relevant parts of Applied Informatics internal developments, so some of my ideas may not make sense.
