Roadmap

Priorities are:

1. Bug fixing.
2. Documentation.
3. Error handling.
4. New features.

Stability is the key feature for adoption. Novelang will grow slowly, and won't advertise a lot until all features I think necessary are present. I don't want to harass my testers with bugs or missing features I already know about. Improvements on short term:

• Report location on every error.
• Try to recover on unmatched delimiter (like missing closing parenthesis).
• Document some tricks.

Requirements for 1.0:

• Better URLs: inside paragraphs, alt and text properties.
• Fix potential punctuation problems.
• Lists, ordered and unordered.
• Images. May turn to an infinite feature list -- be careful!
• Accolades and angled brackets (used for footnotes and index entries).
• Identifiers. These are needed for generating table of content.
• Bold, small caps, superscript, subscript, a few levels of headers below section.
• "Beautiful" PDF generation with a look inspired from Manning's books, table of content, index and so on.

After release 1.0 there are two different paths to follow in parallel (will depend on feedback I suppose):

• Improve content generation.
• Open Novelang to other developers, as an embeddable / extensible software component.

Content generation improvements include:

• Identifier-based inclusions.
• Multi-document output (useful for generating web sites with several pages).
• Resource scan for automatic copy in batch mode.
• Some optimizations for speed / memory consumption.

Componentizing Novelang means:

• Remove dependency to Jetty and rely on pure Servlet API.
• Pluggable tree manipulation functions. By now such a mechanism is used internally but it deserves to get open. Would require some Generics to support custom Environment class.
• Extensible grammars. Thanks to ANTLR 3.1 it will be possible to write a grammar reusing parts of an existing one. So developers could writer their own additions to Novelang's standard grammar, while ANTLR performs all consistency checks. By the way, making a grammar evolve is not a quiet game.
• Extensible grammars mean redefining token list.
• Component weaving with Guice. Guice is the coolest way to assemble components which are, basicall, functions.
• Configurable escape codes, and whitespace triggers.

Novelang as component can be advertised through some plugin for a tool like Maven or Eclipse.