Feature Request: Plugin API

[careck]

If you could open up the internals of Workplace to external plugin developers that would be a tremendous boost to the development and usability of Collanos workplace.

Don't want to develop better support for Word binary formats? let someone out there hook in Apache POI and develop a plugin for it.

Custom data types and applications? Let someone else come up with ideas and implement them.

Better export? Export a workspace to the web? Or to XML? Or to a Foxpro database (shudder) ?? let someone else do these things.

You, the Collanos team could focus on the infrastructure. At the moment the 'community' is really a one-sided affair, you provide stuff, we consume and comment. Plugins and extension would dramatically shift that towards a more equal footing, we plugin developers could provide much better feedback on the Collanos infrastructure and would be alot more personally involved.

Why stop at plugins/extensions? make it scriptable! let users attach scripts to a workplace which get synchronized to all other users of that space!

Anyway, just a thought...

Cheers,
Carsten.

[Franco Dal Molin]

Hi Carsten

Thanks for all the good ideas and great suggestions, I really appreciate it. In fact, this is the direction we want to move to and are moving to. Until recently, the platform was just not ready yet for this, and I think it is still not stable (from an concepts/interfaces point of view) enough, to release API's. On the other side, you are absolutely right, we should just start somewhere and begin to collect feedback from you plug-ins and extensions developers. Only so we will be able to refine and evolve the API's.

We will need one or two more releases before we are ready. These releases will prepare the foundation, e.g. by defining XML schemes for business objects and models, by providing additional general-purpose interfaces to move data in and out from Collanos and interfaces with popular import/export standards. Once that is in place, we will begin to open-up the platform gradually.

We are looking forward to exciting times and are thrilled by the perspective of working with the development community very soon.