Ceylon: Planning the future of Ceylon 1.x

With the release of Ceylon 1.1, we’ve reached a point where we need to do some serious thinking about what are our priorities for the development of Ceylon 1.1.5, 1.2, and beyond. I definitely don’t yet have a crystal clear vision of what is going to be in 1.2, so we’re also looking for community feedback on this.

I do know of one item which is the top priority right now, and will be the main feature of Ceylon 1.1.5:

 
 
 

• Serialization.

This was a feature that slipped from Ceylon 1.0, and which again narrowly missed out on inclusion in Ceylon 1.1. The concept behind serialization in Ceylon is to have an API responsible for assembling and disassembling objects that is agnostic as to the actual format of the serialized stream. Of course, this API also has to be platform neutral, in order to allow serialization between programs running on the JVM and programs running on a JavaScript VM. Tom Bentley already has a working prototype implementation. Once this feature is done, we can start working on serialization libraries supporting JSON and whatever else.

I also count the following as a high priority areas of work:

• Java EE integration, and support for technologies like JPA and CDI.
• Adding properties to the language, that is, a new syntax for attribute references, allowing easy MVC UI bindings.
• Improving the Cayla web framework, and ceylon.html.

Beyond that, we’re not sure where else we should concentrate development effort. Here are some things that stick out to me:

• Addition of named constructors, allowing multiple ways to instantiate and initialize a class.
• AST transformers—a system of compiler plugins, based around ceylon.ast, enabling advanced compile-time metaprogramming, which would form the foundation for LINQ-style queries, interceptors and proxies, and autogeneration of equals(), hash, and string, and more.
• Addition of a syntax for expressing patterns in BNF.
• The Ceylon plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.
• Android support.
• Assemblies—a facility for packaging multiple modules into a deployable “application”.
• New platform modules defining dynamic interfaces for typesafe interaction with JavaScript APIs such as the DOM, jQuery, etc.
• Interoperation with dynamic languages on the JVM, via Ceylon’s dynamic blocks and dynamic interfaces.
• Enabling the use of Ceylon for scripting.

We can’t do all of this in Ceylon 1.2. Therefore, we’re looking for feedback from the community. Let us know, here in comments, or on the mailing list, what you feel is missing from Ceylon, either from the above list, or whatever else you think is important.