Today I took a short visit at the Drupal conference, held in Budapest, Hungary. (Drupal Konferencia 2006, Hungarian link only.) I had the chance to talk with Dries Buytaert, Károly Négyesi and other lead developers of Drupal.

I do not attempt to give a summary or comparison between the two CMFs, because I hardly know Drupal. It was an interesting experience to recognize the same patterns we apply in Plone but in a quite different context. I had an overall good impression and was very welcome by our "rivals". (No, I did not wear my Plone Conference t-shirt. :-) )

I also had a chance to learn about the usage experiences of AJAX technologies in Drupal. Drupal has already adopted jQuery as its  javascript framework and plans to build its AJAX services on top of that. jQuery indeed looks very promising and many developers will agree on this.

This makes me stronger in my position: the core of KSS is currently independent of all javascript frameworks, and it should stay so. The layer that enables access from KSS to any particular framework should not go into the KSS core, but should be implemented as a KSS plugin component (distributable together with the core or separated) instead. This has been our recent practice, and I'm convinced we should continue with that. This ensures not only that we will always be able to deploy simultaneously multiple javascript frameworks if needed, but also that we can always reuse the most stable and best maintained javascript codebase that is available.

I mention this because during the BubbleNet sprint I had an argument with Daniel Nouri who was in favour of depending on Mochikit, and I also understand that others promote the usage of Prototype and Scriptaculous. I believe that the above outlined solution allows us to take the best of all worlds.