Hot off the presses! The latest preview release of Tapestry, 5.4-alpha-3, is now available.
Point your build tool of choice at the Maven repository: https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/orgapachetapestry-072/ Binary and source archives: http://people.apache.org/~hlship/tapestry-releases/ What's new? So much, I've kind of lost track; the main changes are: Most assets are now accessed using a URL that incorporates a Adler32 checksum of the asset content. Prior versions of Tapestry incorporated the application version number into the URL. What does this mean? When you redeploy your web application, most assets will have not changed: same content, same path, same checksum, therefore, same URL. This means that client browsers will not have to re-download all those assets again just because the application version number has changed. Assets that have changed will have a different content hash, and therefore, a different asset URL. Browsers will be sure to pull down those new versions. Modules are slightly different; because all JavaScript modules are expected to start in a common root URL, there is no reasonable way to generate a unique content hash for each; module URLs still use the application version number. However, modules and all assets now also send an ETag header; this means that module requests will still be sent, but will often get a 304 (resource not modified) response. Obviously, this is a big change, and we're welcoming feedback. Next up; we have first class support for jQuery.A little bit of symbol tweaking, and Prototype and Scriptaculous are simply gone for good. There's also been improvements to operation tracking, with more operations performed during a request being tracked. This is useful for the part of the exception report page that discusses what Tapestry did during a request, leading up to the actual exception. There's been big improvements, c/o Kalle, in terms of how exceptions are reported, with finer control over what gets the full exception page, and what doesn't. For the rare places where public interfaces changed in incompatible ways, there's now an @IncompatibleChange annotation for methods that have changed. A few informational pages such as PageCatalog, ServiceStatus, and Hibernate Statistics have been merged into a new single (extensible) page, T5Dashboard. ... and lots more little changes, fixes, and improvements. There's still a lot more to come, however. Two principle improvements I'm targeting for 5.4: Proper server-side push/websocket support. Built-in performance monitoring and reporting. -- Howard M. Lewis Ship Creator of Apache Tapestry The source for Tapestry training, mentoring and support. Contact me to learn how I can get you up and productive in Tapestry fast! (971) 678-5210 http://howardlewisship.com
