The Casbah Project wasn't begun to build an application framework. We initially wanted to build a content management system, and we still do. But as the design matured in the Spring of 1998, we realized that were beginning to describe a set of APIs, protocols, and design commitments that could support a wide-range of applications. We then decided that the Open Source world didn't really have anything else that would do what we were describing.

So the plan now is to build the application framework so that lots of different things can be done with it, and then a subset of The Casbah Team will focus on building a content management system; but other subsets will start building other things. What kinds of things?

• literate programming source management -- putting Casbah (the thing) to work managing Casbah (the process); this will facilitate open source collaboration.
• literate website management
• web-based email system (like Hotmail)
• web-based groupware calendaring system
• web-based SGML/XML documentation server
• web-based national high school journalism resource -- this is the basis of Casbah's co-application for an NSF grant with the SchoolWire folks.
• EDI-like system using Casbah, XML, SMTP driver, and an IPSec kernel TCP/IP stack
• personal organizer of sorts, similar to Frontier
• XML integrated development environment, just add XEmacs
• groupware-version of Gelertner's Lifestreams
• an experimental version of Linux which used XML for all its configuration files and stored them in Coptic, like the registry in NT, but human readable and human editable
• intelligent, mobile agent applications
• data mining applications
• app for reading Usenet news and email (especially mailing lists) with a unitary interface (submitted by Earl Wagner)