Ideas Repository

The "Ideas Repository" it's meant to be a web application where people can submit ideas about programs, utilities, tools they would like to see developed.

Ever felt the "blank page" syndrome? When you want to code something, but don't know what?

Well, wy waste time coding abstract and not useful exercises or puzzles, or "yet-another-whatever-you-want", when there can be someone, out there, who needs some kind of software?

 Well, the purpose of this repository is exactly to allow meeting of demand and offer: people that need some kind of software, and developers willing to code something. I've thought of this primarily as something to boost the birth of grails and groovy projects, but if it grows it should easily become language agnostic.

 One thing should be clear: it's not intended to propose or discuss addition to the groovy language or the grails framework themselves, if not as a collateral effect.

Of course, it can be possible that come of the ideas in the repository will become officially added to Groovy/Grails (just like already happens for projects at dev.java), but the challenge should not be for committers, but for users.

Another goal for the "Ideas Repository" application may be the creation of a showcase for grails features: AJAX, feeds, plugins, and whatever else.

 Possible topics can be:
- new grails plugins
- a web-app to manage foosball tournaments (oh..well..I'm trying to do this...)
- some system tools to automate tasks
- tools for web developers (a colleague of mine once needed a tool to backup multiple sites on multiple hosts easily and automatically)
- Multicast filecopy
- whatever you may need, or would like to see implemented, or your great revolutionary idea that you cannot develop on your own

 The repository itself should be the very first idea for the repository itself. Here's a list of possible features:

- tagging of entries
Ideas can be tagged just like everyone is doing out there.
- level of difficulty
how the solution is, or should be, complex. A complete tournament management application may be 5, when a simple "is-that-site-alive" application 2.
- comments and discussions
Every "idea" should have support for comments/discussions, so users will be able to discuss and develop the idea
- votes
simple as it's written, users can vote ideas, just like in digg
- RSS/ATOM
feeds about what's happening on the site: ideas with new activity, new ideas, file releases, etc.
- authentication
of course, basic authentication should be required
- a link section to existing projects implementing the idea
some ideas may seem original and never developed, but who knows...if someone find some software that already meets the requirements, will simply add a link to that software
- use cases (requirements)
when an idea will begin to seem more like a project, there will be need for some additional support to manage requirements, use cases, etc.
- Implementation details: language, platform, basic architecture, etc.
when a new idea is submitted, or an existing is discussed, there may be the willing to define some techical requirements. Maybe someone would need a Grails plugin, or a Java library, or a groovy image resizer to embed in some script.

The final result should be a public, social, web2.0 software requirements application. 

Of course, this page is open for additions, advices and critics.