 <chapter id="future"><title>Future Directions</title>
  
  <para>
   We have a new and better version of the front-end server on the drawing
   board. Resources and external commitments will govern when we'll be
   able to do something real with it. Features should include greater
   flexibility, greater support for access/resource control, and easy
   support for Explain (possibly with Zebra as an extra database engine).
  </para>
  
  <para>
   &yaz; is a BER toolkit and as such should support all protocols
   out there based on that. We'd like to see running ILL applications.
   It shouldn't be that hard. Another thing that would be interesting is
   LDAP. Maybe a generic framework for doing IR using both LDAP and
   Z39.50 transparently.
  </para>
  
  <para>
   The SOAP implementation is incomplete. In the future we hope
   to add more features to it. Perhaps make a WSDL/XML Schema compiler.
   The authors of libxml2 are already working on XML Schema / RelaxNG
   compilers so this may not be too hard.
  </para>

  <para>
   It would be neat to have a proper module mechanism for the Generic
   Frontend Server so that backend would be dynamically 
   loaded (as shared objects / DLLs).
  </para>

  <para>
   Other than that, &yaz; generally moves in the directions which appear to
   make the most people happy (including ourselves, as prime users of the
   software). If there's something you'd like to see in here, then drop
   us a note and let's see what we can come up with.
  </para>

 </chapter>
 
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