Wt-Team & Community: What is the future of Wt?
Added by Stefan Bn 6 months ago
Hello Wt-Team & Wt-Community,
first of all, I'm a big fan and very grateful for Wt! I like the framework design and the possibility to use C++ resulting in lightwight web servers and applications.
However, as it is obvious here in the forums, there is less and less activity over the months and years. It's hard for newbies to get on track with Wt and younger generations of developers usually don't go with C++ in the first place, which means the Wt community is likely not to grow anymore. Existing Wt users don't get much answers or no answers at all to specific questions here on the forums :-( The list of open bugs in the Wt framework is long and very little is happening, maybe once a month. Not to speak of the open feature requests.
I would like to hear about Wt-team's honest perspecitve on the future of Wt? Maybe at a time scale of 2 to 5 years? Will there be security and feature updates, bug fixes? What does the Wt team excpect from the community? I sincerely do understand that there are staffing, business and financial aspects involved in order to keep Wt alive and less users mean less in this regard.
For me it is a little sad, since I do have a large code base that I would like to operate and extend over the next 5 to 10 years.
So question to all: Where to go next? There are little other frameworks targeting C++ but I'm not sure whether this is the way to go anymore. Are there any tools/frameworks that may be used to bridge between existing Wt-applications and new frameworks in order to keep the old codebase while developing future-proof new web features/apps? What programming languages/frameworks can be recommended?
Thanks,
Stefan
Replies (4)
RE: Wt-Team & Community: What is the future of Wt? - Added by Wim Dumon 6 months ago
Hello Stefan,
Good news: we have no intention to reduce the effort in the development of Wt and/or JWt (rather the opposite), and there are no plans to discontinue Wt. Forum activity comes and goes, but you're right that lately we've been a bit too passive on answering to community questions. We'll try to be a bit more active on the fora - often this is not the top priority and too easy to keep track of when things get busy.
It is our target to have about 4 releases per year. These definitely include security fixes, and important bug fixes. In the coming releases, you can expect new features in the are of WebSockets (WWebSocketResource), an update to the authentication framework (MFA), and a rework of the authentication framework to support additional authentication methods.
Wt's new features are in big part steered by the popular suggestions we get from the community, and the requests from our commercial customers.
As usual, I highly recommend Wt for developing future-proof web applications! :-)
Best regards,
Wim.
RE: Wt-Team & Community: What is the future of Wt? - Added by Mark Travis 6 months ago
Great to hear! I've been working on a commercial offering for 2 1/2 years and I can't imagine having to re-write it for another framework. I could do it, but I love this framework. I fear the process of training new hires (if I get to level!), but I think I know enough to get them productive.
Two suggestions:
1) A Swift language wrapper around the C++ apis would be very interesting since there are a lot of leading-edge things happening around Swift. And Swift is just a wrapper around C++/C/Obj-C. But I submit that C/C++ will never go away and I think C++ might be coming back around as more people learn the C++17 and C++20 standard libraries that make things SO much easier than C++11 and prior versions.
2) There is a very interesting project that I've been following for a few years that has been working on a next-gen identification platform. https://dock.io I think they are using blockchain or something along those lines.
RE: Wt-Team & Community: What is the future of Wt? - Added by Stephan Kaiser 3 months ago
A bit late to the question, but perhaps an interesting data point nevertheless:
At our company we're in the process of implementing a new customer-facing web front end for our web-based services using Wt. (We are mostly into producing desktop apps, but start to provide web-based services.)
We began to "play around with Wt" a few years back and what's especially great (to us) is that even our early prototypes or demos can be made to run with minimal effort (mostly spent updating dependencies, and our custom premake files). Deployment is also pretty simple which helps as we don't yet have a dedicated ops team, and we like it "as simple as possible".
Our company is heavy on C++ talent (among a few other languages) so that can make a difference when making a choice regarding technology.
Wt, live long and prosper.