Friday, May 16, 2008

Last Year's Last 20 Weeks in Wonder

We'll resume our regularly scheduled This Week in Wonder soon, but I had to go through all the ChangeLogs back to last year's WOWODC to figure out what I wanted to talk about at this year's WOWODC. I thought I'd go ahead and post my notes. There's very little detail here, but it was about 5000 lines of commit logs between June 2007 and January 2008, so these are just the ones that stood out to me. I'm sure there's a inadvertent bias towards thing I worked on (and things at the beginning of the list when I wasn't yet totally annoyed by changelogs).

5.4
* Lots of 5.4 compatibility work

Ajax
* AjaxPing - support very small Ajax poller that can refresh a larger container when the cache key changes
* AjaxInPlace - added support for link vs button submits + better support for being in an existing form
* AjaxLongResponse

Components
* ERXClickableContainer - makes arbitrary elements into links
* ERXWORepetition EO support - if er.extensions.ERXWORepetition.eoSupport=true, GIDs will be used instead of hashcodes
* ERXFlickrBatchNavigation/AjaxFlickrBatchNavigation
* ERXComponent - handy component baseclass

Deployment
* Wonder has slurped up JavaMonitor and wotaskd
* Lots of enhancements to JavaMonitor

EOF
* ERXJDBCConnectionAnalyzer (from GVC) to help debug when you have a connection problem
* Support for ordering adaptor operations (to support SQLServer)
* Put a nail in the coffin of editing context locking
* FrontBasePlugIn - predictable/stable constraint names (for use in migrations)
* Partial Entities (experimental) - more info
* JavaMemoryAdaptor - an in-memory "database" ... really handy for example apps and test cases

ERSelenium
* LOTS of enhancements

Migrations
* New ERXMigration baseclass for migrations that use SQL scripts
* Support for vendor-specific SQL scripts in script migrations
* ERXModelVersion is a top level class now
* Added new API-based migrations - ERXMigrationDatabase, ERXMigrationTable, ERXMigrationColumn

Qualifiers
* ERXFullTextQualifier (if your database supports it)
* ERXQ - shortcut methods for lots of different ways of creating qualifiers
* ERXS - shortcut methods for lots of different ways of creating sort orderings

WOOGNL
* Added support for // VALID on inline bindings

Misc
* New pluralizer for ERXLocalizer (ported from Rails)
* iPhone support in ERXBrowser
* Support for multiple connections in ERIMAdaptor
* Redesigned ERXCrypto to allow pluggable encryption algorithms
* Added support for encrypted properties
* ERXMutableURL
* ERXExpiringCache supports version numbers in addition to timeouts
* ERXStats / ERXStatisticsPage - much more powerful stats tracking
* Refuse new sessions on low memory
* ERXResourceManager supports WebServerResource versioning to control browser caching
* Finally a SINGLE Properties setting for default encoding - er.extensions.ERXApplication.DefaultEncoding
* Lots of enhancements to RuleModeler

New: ERAttachment.framework
Inspired by th attachment_fu rails gem. Provides drop-in support for attachments that can be easily stored locally as static resource, locally as proxied resources via a custom request handler, as in-database resources (not currently streamed out of the database, so this should really only be used for person icons and other small resources), or on S3 as remote resources. See package.html for more details.

ERAttachment, btw, might be my favorite framework in Wonder ... If you use in-database attachments, you're talking add one relationship to your entity and a almost-no-code migration, then drop an ERAttachmentUpload component in your edit page, and an ERAttachmentViewer in your view page, and that's it. Very high bang-for-the-buck.

New: ERChronic.framework
Natural language date parsing (well, assuming your "natural language" is English). Direct port of Chronic from ruby (see http://chronic.rubyforge.org/ and package.html for more details).

New: ERCaching.framework
Support for memcached with WO. I don't actually use this one yet, so Anjo can fill in more info here.

3 comments:

  1. I love you guys! You guys do amazing work and it's nice to see all "interesting" changes summed up for us even though it's a lot of work for you!

    Wonder is great, I can't believe I ever WO'd without it!

    Keep up the good work!

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  2. OK, now you're just pandering :)

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  3. It's all true...I just want you and Anjo to feel appreciated for your efforts. :)

    However, I don't know that I'll be able to come up with 52 interesting "atta-boys". :D

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