These 49 Days in Wonder

General
All Project Wonder projects were switched to the WOLips Nightly's new hotness build path system. This means that to checkout the Wonder source now requires that you use a WOLips Nightly build, though these are pretty likely to turn into stable pretty soon.

We cleared a lot of the backlog of patches in Jira ... Sorry it took us so long.

Ajax
Ajax framework was updated to Prototype 1.6.0.3

AjaxSocialNetwork and AjaxSocialNetworkLink provides support for submitting URLs to a heap of social linking sites using their recommended icons

Components
ERXEmbeddedPage and ERXSwitchEmbeddedPage allow you to wrap a section of your page and treat return values from invokeAction as a replacement only for the this element and not for the entire page. This allows you to write components that operate like a sequence of top level elements, yet actually they live within a larger page.

ERXAccessibleSubmitButton provides support for defining hot keys for submit buttons.

ERXJSToManyRelationshipEditor provides a nice javascript-based to-many relationship editor

ERXBooleanPopUpButton provides a simple Yes/No/All (labels configurable) three-state popup button that binds out a Boolean value, which is handy for boolean search filters

ERXRedirect supports redirecting to a stateful component (in addition to several other variants).

EOF
New "javaEnum" prototype ... Select it and just set the valueClassName to point to your java Enum class.

Lots of fixes for Oracle in the EROraclePlugin including many fixes to make Wonder's ERXMigration API work properly. The Oracle plugin also has a new delegate that allows you to provide a custom constraint name generator (to provide custom truncation rules).

FrontBase, Postgresql, and Oracle plugins now automatically correct the EOF bug with generating "not null" columns for attributes that only appear in subclasses of single table inheritance tables.

ERExtensions
Added ERXSession support for requiring secure session cookies to prevent session hijacking.

ERXEnterpriseObjectCache now supports optionally caching EO's rather than just their GID's, lazily filling the cache rather than preloading the entire set of objects, and caching with a qualifier (i.e. only cache objects where published=true)

ERXYahooContentAnalysisService connects to Yahoo's term extraction service (for use with auto-tagging)

Misc
Lots of fixes to ERRest framework, including many changes necessary to be able to generate a validating schema for a rest document (the schema generator is not yet committed). Lots of additional enhancements to run ERRest documents without a request, which makes it easier to use for data loading.

WOOgnl no longer requires a different source path for 5.3 and 5.4, though it does require a different binary framework.

Lots of fixes to SproutCore framework to bring it more in line with the latest SproutCore releases.

This Belated Week in Wonder

Yeah. It's been a few weeks. I know .... Better late than never:

Ajax
AjaxExpansion - If you've ever tried to make a component that has a triangle (or whatever) that you can turn down to show additional information, you know it's actually a little tricky to build that component and make it animate nicely with a slide down effect. AjaxExpansion makes this easy to do and there is an addition to the AjaxExample2 ToggleDetails example that shows how to use it.

By popular demand, AjaxTabbedPanel can now hide tabs.

AjaxUpdateLink, AjaxSubmitButton, and AjaxObserveField now support updateContainerID="_parent", which will update the nearest ancestor component AjaxUpdateContainer. This makes it so you don't have to pass id's around in the common case that you're just updating your parent container.

There's a new example of using AjaxModalContainer in AjaxExample2.

Chuck fixed tons of weird little border cases.

AjaxModalDialog is now in ... It's a competitor to AjaxModalContainer based on the modalbox Javascript library, but is designed to have a slightly nicer component backend that can track the open state on the server side (which allows for fancier component content). There's a new AjaxExample that shows this in action.

ERExtensions
ERXExceptionUtilities provides a bunch of handle methods for printing and handling stack traces, including stack trace filtering that tries to hide all those nasty looking WO/EOF stack frames. See the javadoc for more info. Also, you can set your log appender to er.extensions.logging.ERXConsoleAppender to get stack trace filtering wired into all of your log4j output. Check out StackTraceSkipPatterns-Normal.plist in ERExtensions/Resources to see how you can provide your own stack trace filtering extensions.

ERXApplication can now load Properties from inside of jar frameworks.

multipleSubmit=true is now defaulted on for all WOForms. Rest in peace stupid binding.

ERXLazyValue provides a way to model lazy-loaded values that invalidate with different methods. This is very useful for storing expensive values that are returned from bound component methods as well as values that are cached that are influenced by different areas of a single page (i.e. ajax operations on one part of the page that need to invalidate a cache on another part of the page).

ERXDisplayGroup now uses generics.

ERXKey now uses generics in all of the .is(..) etc methods.

ERXWOComponentContent is now a little bit slicker and supports the concept of a "default" template. If you define an ERXWOComponentContent with no template name, it will find all of the component content children that are not contained inside of an ERXWOTemplate and treat them as if they were in a default component content.

There's an NSBundle replacement in Wonder now. This fixes a bug with jar loading in embedded frameworks that would end up loading in the application bundle, which causes the very common bug of getting a Session class that isn't your Session. This is also provides some support for making launching non-WOApplication WO things (like EOF main methods) in WOLips a little smarter.

ERXFetchSpecification has a new setIncludeEditingContextChanges(boolean) option. When true, fetching with this fetch spec will call through ERXEOControlUtilities.objectsWithQualifier and also process the new (uncommitted) changes from your EC. For instance, if you have inserted EO's into your EC, includeEditingContextChanges = true will cause those new EO's to be included in the results of the fetch. Likewise, updated, deleted, and parent EC objects will be processed accordingly.

ERPrototypes
New IP Address prototype (along with new migration methods to support it).

New byte24 prototype for generating guid PKs.

Maven
Both the 5.3 and 5.4 version of Wonder can be now be built with Maven. Talk to Henrique for more info :)

ERAttachment
You can now register a custom delegate onto your ERAttachmentProcessors to be notified of various events in the attachment lifecycle. This allows your application to perform additional operations in response to those events.

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.

These 9 Weeks in Wonder

 Yeah, I know, long time no write ... Occasionally Real Work (TM) gets in the way.

Migrations
newLocalizedStringColumn supports creating string columns that work with Wonder's localized attributes ("name_en," "name_de," etc).

Migration support for dropping composite pks (though the FrontBase plugin doesn't actually support this :( ).

BigInteger column support.

newFlagBooleanColumn which generates a Types.BOOLEAN column instead of a varchar(5) or int boolean column.

ERIndexing
Updated to Lucene 2.3.2.

ERIndexingExample is a new example app that shows how to use ERIndexing.

ERCaching
More work on memcached integration, though I think (correct me if I'm wrong, Anjo?) it's not quite ready for primetime yet.

ERSelenium
StandaloneRunner supports running Selenium tests from the commandline.

SproutCore
Initial work on supporting the development of SproutCore applications with WO. Currently the work on SproutCore has been replacing the rails-based templating system with a WO-based templating system. While not necessarily required for developing SC apps, it provides nicer integration with existing tools. Currently you can run the WO-equivalent of several of the SC example apps in live mode ..... mostly :) This is to be considered very experimental right now.

Check out the SproutCoreExample app to see it in action.

Wonder 2.0
We're on Wonder 5.0, but iTunes has lots of miscellaneous enhancements to their Wonder 2.0 fork. Thanks to the iTunes folks, all the enhancements that live in 2.0 are now moving up to the trunk.

JSON
Lots of work on JSON support in Ajax framework.

You can now optionally include attributes and relationships in your JSON results via the client class property setting in your model.

You can specify writable vs read-only attributes.

Marshalling/unmarshalling of EOTemporaryGlobalIDs is supported, so you can pass around uncommitted EO's to/from the server.

There is now support in the client API's for converting full EO's to EO stubs as a performance enhancement when passing to API's that only require an EO's id (the server side faults it back in for you).

Support for custom EO serializers. For instance, you can add the custom serializer for ERAttachments by calling JSONRPCBridge.getSerializer().registerSerializer(new ERAttachmentObjectSerializer()), which will inject the attachmentUrl into the JSON object during serialization so your client can simply refer to the attachment without doing another round-trip.

JSONComponents are an experiment in trying to rethink web services in the language of WOComponents. JSON service endpoints can now return JSONComponents, which are stateful service endpoints. This allows for cleaner encapsulation of your services while also allowing the server to make decisions on the routing path through your service as well as the services themselves being stateful. For instance, clients can call the login method of the authentication service, which can return back the next service to talk to, and just like WOComponents, repeated calls to the component return to the correct state on the server. The end result is actually a bit like PDO ... JSONComponent are to Component Actions as traditional WOWebServices are to DirectActions.

ERAttachment
ERAttachment URLs are now a little smarter and more optimized in that the URL can now include the PK of the attachment being requested. It still verifies the provided webpath for security, but the server can almost always avoid an extra fetch by attempting to fault the PK rather than fetch by webpath.

ERExtensions
ERXRemoteNotificationCenter provides support for posting arbitrary notifications across multiple servers. Provides a simple implementation as well as a JGroups implementation.

ERXIFrame can act as a component for simply creating an iframe to a URL, or more interestingly can render its component content as the iframe contents, which is really handy.

ERXPartialMarker/ERXPartialWrapper is crazy, but if I understand it properly, it provides support for rendering one section of your page that will appear in another section of your page. It's currently used by the SproutCore framework.

ERXFlashMovie is just a handy wrapper around embedding an SWF in a page.

ERXEOGlobalIDUtilities does a lot more work to make sure that it doesn't refetch objects that were already faulted.

ERXQ.containsObject. If you're a fan of the "contains" qualifier selector, you'll be a fan of this method.

ERXRecursiveBatchFetching is a terrible name. It's now named ERXBatchFetchUtilities. The old class extends the new class and is marked @deprecated. ERXBatchFetchUtilities also now provides several batch fetching variants based on ERXKey.

ERXDatabaseContextMulticastingDelegate now supports both 5.3 and 5.4.

ERXTemporaryGlobalID provides many of the benefits of 24-byte GUID PKs without the annoyance of byte[] PKs in your database by "fitting" a GUID into a long-sized value.

ERXEOControlUtilities.convertEOtoGID and convertGIDtoEO now support non-EO objects that contain EOs (for instance, a pojo proxy object that wraps an EO) via the IERXEOContainer and IERXGIDContainer interfaces.

ERXMutableURL is a little smarter about not generating :80's for http and :443's for https.

ERXEOAccessUtilities.createRelationship and createFlattenedRelationship provide easier methods for programatically mucking with your EOModels

ERXEOControlUtilities.distinctValuesForKeyPath will give you an array of the distinct values of a particular keypath on an entity.

ERXModernNavigationMenu/Item provides an upgraded replacement of ERXNavigationMenu/item that are CSS and semantic markup instead of the older table-based layout.

ERXArrayChooser now supports arbitrary qualifiers and fetching of shared objects.

ERXModuloQualifier can generate SQL queries that use the "mod" keyword.

ERXFetchSpecificationBatchIterator now supports prefetching and raw rows.

ERXGenericRecord will now cache its primary key rather than constantly regenerate.

ERXJobLoadBalancer "solves the following problem: we have a set of jobs (identified by an Id) waiting to be processed. Several worker processes are competing for jobs and we need to way to efficiently parcel out those jobs out. We want to avoid as much as possible several workers attempting to grab the same jobs and locking it." This works across instances, by the way. It's works sort of like Xgrid. The new version of ERMailer coming from Wonder 2.0 will use this class to load balance sending email across multiple instances/apps.

Ajax
AjaxObserveField has a new onCreate option that is called after form serialization, but prior to form submission, which allows you to do things like disabling the form while it's sending in the background.

Better compatibility with FireFox 3's more aggressive caching of Ajax requests.

AjaxModalContainer supports binding "action" even when ajax=true, so you can perform a component action prior to rendering the component content of your container.

BugTracker
BugTracker now include support for the audit trails.

Maven
Lots of work on the maven build files for Wonder. As I understand it, which I don't :), Wonder Maven builds "just work".

WO Adaptors
Q updated all the WO adaptors in Wonder. The 5.4 enhancements are merged with the Wonder enhancements. The build files have all been cleaned up, FreeBSD support was added, and several fixes went into the FastCGI adaptor.

ERRest
ERXUnsafeRestEntityDelegate can now be optionally enabled in production. This is handy if your restful service is behind authentication and only used for administrative services where ACLs are not an issue.

ERXAbstractRestEntityDelegate subclasses can more easily provide support for custom "primary keys" to be generated and resolved by overriding _isEOID, _objectWithKey, and idForEO methods.

Not Dead, Just Busy

This week in Project Wonder

Since the move to svn, we've been able to clean things up a bit.

New structure
There are now three important top-level folders, /Applications, /Frameworks and /Examples. If you use checked-out projects, you need to close and delete these projects, then select /Frameworks and pick the ones you like. Note that - depending on what you actually use - it is WAY simpler than before, where you had to visit X subfolder for importing.

Packages
Also, moving stuff in ERX into packages has been a request for quite a while now. We had good reasons not to do this so far, there are numerous thread on the lists where you can read the arguments at your leasure. But eventually we had to do it and now is as good a time as any.

So: the current trunk in SVN contains the repackaged ERX and ERDirectToWeb, complete with all fixes that are needed to build Wonder itself. In your own apps, you should:

- commit outstanding changes (!)
- select the projects, run an "Organize imports"
- check all your EO templates, as a lot of stuff changed packages
- check all your logging configs. A stub ERXPatternLayout is currently
still in er.extensions, but it will go away soon.
- check any xxx.className property which has a er.extensions thing in
it *
- check your model for custom attributes which reference ERX classes
(erprototypes has been fixed)

Deployment

WOTaskd+JavaMonitor have been updated:

- backups of SiteConfigs in /Library/WebObjects/Configuration, prior
to changes. The name indicates the action that happened afterwards.
- fixed an issue with the app delete page
- selection in app detail page is now Ajax and kept
- JavaMonitor/wotaskd are now ERX apps with embedded frameworks

Short break

We interrupt our scheduled program for a news flash:

As of Saturday, Mai 30th 2008, we moved the Wonder repository to SVN. Check out the trunk via

svn co https://wonder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wonder/trunk/Wonder Wonder

The CVS repository will NOT be updated any time soon.

Now on with our regular schedule.