XWorkplace Consolidation

If you check under the hood of the Workplace Shell on ArcaOS 5.0.1 you will notice some thing that are not complete organized.

Problem 1: The WPS Classes
Workplace Shell is based on objects created from WPS Classes. IBM's Workplace Shell has a well defined naming convention for that WPS Classes that starts with WP*, and xWorkplace (The open source desktop enhacement) also tries to have a naming convention with XPW*.

But when you check inside the WPS Classes you can find that there are a lot more.



The Awesome thing is that this is complete transparent for the user. The system may have 4 different WPDesktop childs and it works without the users to know about it. You may disagree with me and say that it is exactly what WPS should do, you can have a lot of childs of different classes, but as a consolidated OS it should try to reduce the complexity.

The problem begin from the development side if you want to extend WPS objects, it starts to look bad.

Possible Solution for Problem #1
It would be interesting to try to merge the functionality of the childs into the xWorplace classes.

Some issues with this solution:
 * 1) Not all developers will like to give their source code to be merged to xWorkplace
 * 2) Users want more features, and this will be like organizing the home, but no new stuff will be saw by the users.
 * 3) This requires efforts from a developer that understand WPS and xWorkplace.