I’ve occasionally posted about Zimki, the Javascript-based server framework with the concept of paying for usage credits rather than hosting the IDE and production environment yourself. Avid readers may remember previous posts on the subject, and winning a competition using the framework.

Anyway, yesterday one of the staff posted what sounds like a hiatus on the Zimki blog. I suspect now the company is pending a profitability/viability review by Canon, and everything will be in a maintenance state until then (some might ask what Canon are doing with a hosted application company anyway, but let’s ignore that difficult question for a few paragraphs).

This in my opinion is quite a sad turn of events. True, the platform is slow and seems to be underspecified server-side, there are minor annoyances/niggles, and the documentation leaves something to be desired – but it’s not actually a bad concept which with a bit of work could take off pretty well.

I’ll probably still look in on Zimki occasionally, but I haven’t had the time or impetus to investigate anything new they’ve done with it in the past few months beyond reading the occasional blog posting. Add to that the lack of further development, and I think it’d take some serious consideration if you were going to put all your business eggs in their basket – especially since the plan to open-source the platform has all but evaporated.

I’m not alone in this: while looking for further info I came upon another developer stating that he’ll not spend any more time on it – something which Zimki can ill afford to lose given how few developers and commercial entities seem to be actually using it in anger despite another developer contest. Discussion on the unofficial Zimki forum I set up some time back is sparse at best.

If Canon do want to get rid of it, putting it on hiatus may well demolish what interest the developers have, and erode the commercial confidence of the beancounters – rendering it almost worthless.