RSF Discussions Forum

RSF at age 2 is a lot firmer on its feet - hard to believe this time last year we didn't have multi-file templates, and the wiki was still being written in the 1st person! The most exciting news today is the imminent release of the RSF-Spring Web Flow integration, which more firmly aligns RSF with the Spring web stack, joining its earlier support for SpringMVC and Spring validation.

Growth this year has been less explosive, and steady - as well as the early release of MFT with 0.7, and the growing clutch of RSF widgets, the Universal View Bus, we have had more user-led requirements, such as the improved UIMessage and ARI2, led by experiences from the evaluation project, headed up by Aaron Zeckoski. The RSF community, after proliferating, has moved its centre of gravity back towards Cambridge, with the two most prominent members of the community, Steve Githens and Aaron Zeckoski, being hired to work full-time at CARET. New outreach is underway, with prominent projects in progress by Dave Horwitz at Cape Town, Josh Ryan at Arizona State, Mark Norton at Massachusetts, and, most excitingly, our strengthening partnership with the Fluid UI Project at Toronto, headed up by Jutta Treviranus and Colin Clark. At a recent demonstration at JA-SIG, Denver, the universal portability of RSF widgets and apps was excitingly shown off with the Fluid Lightbox widget and Gallery app running without changes in both Sakai (as Servlets) and uPortal/Pluto (as a JSR-168 Portlet), complete with AJAX plus drag'n'drop.

This next year will see the crucial release of RSF 0.8, which will see it solidified into its final form - at which point it will be time to make a more aggressive push to reach users outside its "cradle", the Sakai community. Here's to next year!