This Week in Wonder

Ajax
The AjaxExample2 app has been committed to Wonder. This is the application that was shown during the Ajax session at WOWODC 2008. Whereas AjaxExample shows off many features of the framework but not with real-world examples, AjaxExample2 takes the approach of trying to show the framework off in the context of solving real interface problems.

ibox.js in AjaxModalContainer was updated to 2.17b

You no longer have to iBox.init() at the end of your AjaxUpdateContainers when you generate new AjaxModalContainers in ajax responses. This all "just works" now.

AjaxModalContainer has a new locked flag that disallows closing and an open flag that forces it open (rather than waiting for a click).

AjaxModalContainer works with HTTPS URLs now.

New AjaxUtils.arrayValueForBinding utility method, which supports loading array bindings that are defined as references to NSArray as well as inline JSON-syntax Strings.

Migrations
ERXMigrationTable provides a newLargeStringColumn method that corresponds roughly to the varcharLarge prototype in Wonder. This helps to abstract out the weird big column width you'd previously have to define in your migrations for those columns and hopefully makes this more database independent.

EOF
ERXModelGroup checks for a subtle problem that is probably more common than people might think where your connection dictionaries across multiple models aren't EXACTLY the same, which results in EOF treating them like different databases. Now this will generate an exception at startup.

ERXJDBCConnectionBroker has a new fix for a resource contention problem with leaving connections in an incorrect state.

FrontbasePlugIn
You can now set com.frontbase.unique.[ModelName].[EntityName]=xxx, com.frontbase.unique.[ModelName]=xxx, or com.frontbase.unique=xxx to specify the initial unique value that is used by the FrontBasePlugIn when it generates sequences. I don't think EntityModeler will pick this up, but if you're using migrations, you'll get it.

Components
Ravi Mendis has committed fixes for XHTML compliance in several components.

Misc
ERXResponse supports pushing and popping response content on a stack. This is interesting if you want to post process the output of a single component in isolation from the rest of the response (but you want to maintain all the other state of the response).

ERXExtensions.initApp and ERXExtensions.initEOF should be a little easier to use now. In your JUnit TestSuites, you can just add a static method:


static {
ERXExtensions.initApp(Application.class, new String[0]);
}


and you will be running your test case in a full Wonder-ful Application environment.

ERIUI
If you've ever tried out the iui css + js for making iPhone apps, you may have noticed that it is a complete disaster for connecting to component-action-based WO apps. The Javascript presumes stateless URLs and eventually will explode. ERIUI takes the base CSS work from iui but with a completely rewritten Javascript layer that provides much richer stateful component-based interactions with your app. The docs are severely lacking on this one at the moment (this was just a hobby framework for me). To get good performance on the phone, the framework uses WebKit CSS animations (which currently only works in the WebKit nightlies, not in Safari 3.x), though it "gracefully" degrades (to no animation) on the desktop. Checkout ERIUIExample to see it in action ... This should be considered "preview" quality for now.

Google Chart
There's a new GoogleChart framework for generating charts via the Google Chart API. This is inspired (quite a bit) by the Ruby googlecharts framework. There's more info here.