So what's coming for JBJF? JBJF is basically a volunteer effort at this point. We do have some major enhancements planned for JBJF, some open source, some commercial. The following are some points of interest for all. The ideas are not presented in any particular order, or importance...
Subversion and Maven - In Progress
To align with SourceForge and better code management all the JBJF Projects will be migrated to Subversion. In addition, most of the JBJF Projects will be converted to Maven for easier code management. The exceptions to Maven will be the Eclipse Plugins and any of the Test and Tutorial Projects, these will remain as Ant and Eclipse Projects.
JBJF Framework 3.0.0 - Pending
A new version of the Framework will be designed and developed. Like 2.0.0, it will not be backward compatible, as 3.0.0 is being done to correct a terrible design flaw on my part. The use of ITaskDefinition and ITaskRuntime has been an utter failure, making the framework harder to use. The original goal was to allow for a GUI Designer Eclipse RCP application. But it's become a nightmare for the framework, and I'm going to reverse that mistake.
JBJF Node - Pending
The JBJF Node will be a Web Container based Project that will host JBJF in a Web Container such as Tomcat or JBoss. Using a SOAP Web Service, you will beable to run jobs from a remote client using a simple Web and Command line client. The target platform for this will be Spring-Boot and JDK 1.8.
Domain Model - Open Source - Complete!
The current XML model is a manual implementation using a basic SAX parser and custom Java classes. In an effort to reduce maintenance on these custom classes, we would like to use JAXB to generate Java classes for us. We are targeting JAXB since it will probably become a pre-packaged part of the JDK/JRE. While there are other XML Binding frameworks, such as XML Beans from Apache, this would be an additional library we would need to package with JBJF. If JAXB becomes a standard package, there is no need to add additional libraries to JBJF.
This is complete and was delivered as part of JBJF 2.0.0.
JBJF Daemons Framework - Open Source - In Progress
After multiple requests to design a daemon/serivce framework for JBJF, I'm working on a JBJF Daemon Framework to complement JBJF. The basic concept is a pure Java implementation that will provide a daemon/service platform.
This is in progress, soon to be released.
JBJF GUI - Commercial
The current development model for JBJF is XML and your favorite Editor. While simple enough for developers, XML can be troublesome to a mass audience. Plans are in place for a Drag-n-Drop GUI built on the Eclipse RCP framework that would allow developers and Analysts to build batch jobs using a friendly, professional GUI tool and Editor. The final product will be a commercial product as the time and effort to create this is considerable.
JBJF Threads - Open Source
This will be a major enhancement to the core framework. The idea is to introduce an optional Threading component for individual Tasks. A new indicator would be added to the Task element of the Batch Definition file. Once enabled (On), the Task would run as a separate thread in the batch job. The challenge here is the dependency model to support this...i.e. Task1 runs as a Thread and Task3 is "dependent" on results from Task1. So how do we "link" the two Tasks together.