1. Introduction

This document is meant to lay out basic conclusions after the year 2008 and present ideas for the future in regards to project status, development and road map.

This document represents only my personal views and ideas.

2. What we have today

• backend for processing RSS/ATOM feeds
• UI for browsing feed contents

3. Vision

Project changes:

• fully embrace the Discussion Tracker idea: http://live.gnome.org/Straw/DiscussionTracker - by embrace I mean go as far as completely "rebrand" the project as GNOME Discussion Tracker

• abandoning compatibility with previous versions, shifting development cycle into the "long term" mode, meaning a prototype within several months

Big changes but at this point changes are better than stagnation. Also in the long term there is a chance for a something more than a feed reader.

Architectural changes:

• clear separation of the UI and backend - preferably into separate processes; backend acting as a daemon process that maintains content database, polls sources, serves UI requests; see also: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145454

• UI could simply be a RDF content (SIOC/FOAF/...) browser - backend could do the conversion from database representation to the RDF representation and serve that to the UI
• support for various sources in the backend - RSS/ATOM (duh!), mailing lists, Twitter, blogs etc.

Implementation:

• backend <-> UI communication could be done via dbus

• employ fully-fledged ORM solution, preferably SQLAlchemy in the backend
• rdflib or similar

Paweł Paprota