[dev] The future of Jonah and Thomas

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Hi folks-

There's been some discussion in the past, revived recently, about the  
overlap between Thomas and Jonah. I've taken the old discussions,  
talked to some of the developers about their needs and uses of feeds,  
Jonah, etc., and I've come up with the proposal/plan/spec outlined here:

http://wiki.horde.org/Project/Thomas#toc4

The highlights, so you don't have to click, are:

* Jonah and Thomas merge into one application that creates feeds, one or more
   per user
* Hippo is created as a content aggregation application
* IMP gets feed reading capabilities in a virtual folder
* Horde_Feed gets the ability to compose feeds together natively, and the
   ability to address feeds by universal names (normalization)
* The feed-reading portal block is retained and improved
* A generic Horde linkback service is created
   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback)

This also means that Jonah will be a PHP 5 application, and targeted  
for Horde 4, not Horde 3.2.

If you have concerns about this, please raise them now. If you have  
ideas or are inspired by it, please let us know too. :)

Best,
-chuck