What's Next for GoAhead and Appweb

It has been a hectic few months with plenty of releases and new initiatives. GoAhead and Appweb 5 have been updated and Appweb 6 has been released. Both products have started to make extensive use of the Pak package manager and we have a growing set of components available via GitHub.

But what does the future hold?

First a summary of the past year:

• Appweb 5 updated (5.5)
• Appweb 6 released (6.0)
• GoAhead released (3.4)
• Expansive web site generator released
• Pak package manager released
• Extensive documentation updates for all products
• New web site https://www.embedthis.com/
• Appweb, GoAhead and ESP use Expansive for templates and layouts
• Hundreds of new unit tests
• New TestMe unit test framework

With all that behind us, here is a peek at the priority items for GoAhead and Appweb for the next six months.

Roadmap for GoAhead

• HTTP/2
• Integrate MbedTLS
• Sample management application using Aurelia+Semantic-UI
• Reusable components published as Pak Packages for login, field-validation, sessions, etc.
• Samples
• Aurelia skeleton application

Roadmap for Appweb

• HTTP/2
• Integrate MbedTLS
• Sample management application using Aurelia+Semantic-UI
• More optimizations - reduce footprint
• Quick start video tutorials

HTTP/2

HTTP/2 is a next generation HTTP protocol. It builds upon HTTP/1 and reduces network latency and enhances throughput. The base for HTTP/2 was a protocol called SPDY developed by Google and deployed in Chrome. With HTTP/2, you should see faster page refreshes, particularly over mobile devices.

HTTP/2 support will be a configurable option and will support the MbedTLS SSL stack.

MbedTLS

MbedTLS is a compact, reliable and robust TLS/SSL stack suitable for embedded. Originally called PolarSSL, it is now part of ARM. MbedTLS is ideal because of its small footprint and the fact that we will integrate it into the Appweb source code and it will build by default without any extra build or link steps. Currently, building OpenSSL for embedded can be a painful exercise. Building with MbedTLS will be transparent.

Aurelia + SemanticUI

When building embedded management applications, the best design approach is typically to use a client-side Javascript framework like Aurelia, Angular or React. These web server then provides the data, while the client-side framework renders the user interface. We will be releasing a complete sample management application using Aurelia. For the look and feel, we leverage the Semantic UI CSS/HTML framework for user interface elements. Combined, they provide a highly attractive, usable and responsive user interface.