Aranea Blog

It has been a couple of months since the last version – Aranea 1.2 – was released. In the following version, the target was to fix all critical bugs and to add some new features as well. While no major changes were made, it’s worth to have an overview of new stuff:

• A second look on JavaScripts. Here many smaller changes have been done and should be mostly backward compatible.

  For example, all JavaScripts written for Aranea (aranea*.js) are now compressed for quicker download. If you want, you can also uncompressed the code by appending “src/” to the file URL (e.g. <ui:importScripts file="js/aranea/src/aranea.js"/>) or “-devel” to the group name (e.g. <ui:importScripts group="all-devel"/>). Other scripts are also  planned to be compressed in the following releases.

  In addition, many scripts were rewritten in modern style to make code clearer and shorter while still preserving compatibility. However, the plan is to further rewrite the scripts to make them shorter and easier to customize (mostly in Aranea 2.0).

  The Aranea.ModalBox was rewritten to be more customizable as there is strong need for this. The article describing customization will follow in couple of days. Also note that a method has been added for closing an overlay without any buttons, which should be used as following: Aranea.ModalBox.closeWithAjax.defer(eventId, widgetId[, eventParam]). Therefore, the widget should implement an event handler for closing this overlay mode. This method can be called, for example, by a key event listener written in JavaScript.

  The 1.2.1 release also contains some other improvements, e.g.  blocking double-submits, ability to customize autofocusing of form elements between AJAX requests, auto-reload of first page when session expires and AJAX request fails.

  In addition to the future plans mentioned above, we also hope to upgrade Prototype JS library (to include fixes for memory leaks) as soon as it arrives in an official release.

• Update regions. The truth is that update regions are not identified by the HTML tags but instead by the ID of the tag. Therefore, it doesn’t matter which tag you use. Because the are places where SPAN (the default used for update region) is not suitable, the <ui:updateRegion/> tag now has the “tag” attribute to specify other tag for the update region. In addition, <ui:updateRegionRow/> tag has been added to update a row in table (e.g. editable list row) – this tag outputs TR as the HTML element.
   
• FlowContext.Handler implementations. A couple of classes worth mentioning have been added to Aranea. First, DefaultHandler, which is basically a dummy class implementing FlowContext.Handler, as a convenient class if you don’t want to implement both onFinish and onCancel of the FlowContext.Handler to reduce noise. Second, RefreshingListsFlowContextHandler, takes ListWidgets and updates them onFinish and/or onCancel.
   
• Small fixes. Some changes were made to fix an obvious bug, while others where made to overcome an obstacle. Some of the latter ones are worth mentioning:
  • TextControl has now a method getTextType(), which describes the text content semantics. Before the type could be set but not read.
  • List filtering with StartsWithExpression, EndsWithExpression, and LikeExpression for memory-based backends – now don’t use regular expression anymore due to some weird  behaviour for end-users.
  • It is now possible to escape from uniqueness check of SelectControl values by using a constructor method.
  • It is possible to avoid <table> around a date-time input by using the inline attribute of <ui:dateTimeInput/>.
  • TextareaControl now supports onChange events.

For those using Aranea 1.2, the upgrade is highly recommended.

Finally, I would like to thank all the bug reporters and code submitters for their time and effort! I would also like to remind that if anybody has a problem to solve, an idea for a new feature, or has code the extends Aranea and thinks that others might need it as well – all your input is more than welcome to make the following release better than before!

Now, download your copy now!

All the best and good luck!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.