I'm a contributor to Aloha and recently project underwent a huge re-write to cut down the cruft. Next release, will use a light weight UI based on jQuery and also switching to a newer command API based on W3C's editing API will also make things more faster (and easier).

Main issue with the documentation was the rapid changes to the API in the past. Since the API is getting stable there will be more concern on improving the documentation.

Sorry, just re-read my comment and realised I came across as yet another of those entitled and grumpy anonymous commenters you find online. For what it’s worth, I like Aloha as integrated into the Aloha site, I just failed miserably despite much effort to integrate seamlessly into a recent project. I was aware of the jQuery UI rewrite but the branch didn’t seem to have had any commits in the previous two weeks when I looked so I assumed progress was slow. Glad to hear there’s more definitive plans.

I stand by my comment about the lack of documentation though. I appreciate that it’s often difficult to get people to contribute to docs over code, but it’s pretty imperative for a project like this that there’s at least an easy integration walkthrough and a handful of examples showing common customisations.

That sounds very promising. Do you have a time frame for this release?

I among others will work on the dev-jqueryui branch in June. I hope we will manage to stabilize it and merge it to dev in this time.

It should be noted that we plan to make the ui an optional part of Aloha (with default being a jqueryui implementation) to make it easier to integrate into existing systems. The heavy extjs dependency is part of why Aloha is so huge.

I also plan to look into using google closure compiler in ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATION mode to shrink the size to the absolute minimum.