We released a new version of the Web:Extend framework today. The work continue towards the 1.0 release.
The current version fixes a number of issues and makes various improvements. The API didn’t change much, although we did a few additions:
Forms externals:
Forms externals are a mechanism allowing a developer to build part of a form dynamically. Currently it allows a developer to retrieve options for selectable widgets directly from the model domain just by specifying a function or method to call. For example you could retrieve a list of users from a users set using <external type="set" source="myUsersSet::fetchFormOptions"/>. This method would return value/label pairs to be used as option items. It can also be used for hierarchical data types, where the hierarchy is represented by a multi-level array.
API browser:
The new API browser is based on the jQuery Finder plugin. There is still some quirks here and there, and we also intend to add additional functionality with subsequent releases (like a search function, allowing you to find the deprecated API, or all the interfaces, for example), but the main functionality is there and the result is already better than the original. Feel free to comment on it and suggest how we could improve it.
New server:
Two weeks ago we moved to a new and much bigger server. Now that we have enough flexibility we intend to put various services, including daily test reports from various sources (anyone will be able to setup a daily test that will be aggregated and displayed on our server). We’ll also start a few projects that will demonstrate how to use the framework. More information on that later.
Next release:
Our work will continue in the next release. It will include plugins, since after some discussion we now have a better idea of how we want to implement that. It will also include various improvements, most of them detailed in the roadmap.
Thanks for your interest and see you soon!
March 24th, 2009 by Loïc Hoguin · Tags: PHP5, Release, Web:Extend