The DomAPI 5 skunk works project has begun. I've been assembling ideas for new features to appear in the next version of DomAPI for some time now, but it's now time to start getting your ideas as well.

While the last major release concentrated mainly on performance enhancements, this next version so far is aimed purely at adding new and exciting features and components.

The cornerstone of the release will be in making components more data-aware. While DomAPI components have always been able to display datasets in a variety of ways from a host of different formats, the onus was always on the developer to hook these up to whatever backend they were using. So while DomAPI took care of all the client code for you, you still effectively needed to roll your own middleware.

So for version 5, a new component layer (DComponent) is being introduced into the class hierarchy. All components that support data awareness will now descend from this class instead of directly from Component.

Proposed changes to class hierarchy