A milestone release of the upcoming RSF 0.7.3 is now available in the CARET Maven 2 Development repository at http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/maven2dev/ (check the http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/rsfwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=TrunkCode ) page for more pointers.
This release is mainly devoted to bugfixes - for a progress JIRA view go along to http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF/fixforversion/10160 However, there are a couple of significant new features either in preparation or already complete for this release. Full-cycle testing ================== RSF's level of abstraction allows test fixtures to be written against the function of the UI level without needing to get involved in the often irrelevant details of the Http/Servlet spec. This milestone exhibits some custom derivatives of JUnit TestCase, "MultipleRSFTests" which allow test cases to be expressed directly in terms of RSF component trees and user responses, render and action cycles in the abstract, which leads to much closer correspondence between application spec and testing code. These test cases are also considerably increasing the solidity of the framework - take a look at https://saffron.caret.cam.ac.uk/svn/projects/RSFUtil/trunk/test/uk/org/ponder/rsf/test/diminish for an example. JSON and Data views =================== RSF's binding system has been comprehensively rewritten to uniformly use JSON throughout, rather than the previous mixture of XML and Python-inspired dictionary formats. This greatly increases the transparency of the bindings to code written on the client, and also enables "pure JSON views" to be written very easily - check https://saffron.caret.cam.ac.uk/svn/projects/RSFSamples/trunk/AjaxJSON/src/java/uk/org/ponder/rsfsamples/json/producers/JSONCatalogView.java for an example of how straightforward this is. RSF includes its own encoders and this functionality requires no further dependencies. Client-side rendering ===================== An exciting new direction within Sakai generally as well as RSF is the possibility of having markup rewritten on the client. This allows more rapid prototyping and lightweight development by end users and "casual" programmers, leading to more rapid innovation in UI thinking as well as a greater agnosticism on the server-side. An important mission within Sakai is to roll out a consistent component/widget set framework-wide, and whilst many of these are being written in Fluid/RSF, large parts of Sakai remain in Velocity, JSF, XSLT and a ragbag of other frameworks and are unlikely to meet resources to be rewritten in the near term. Client-side rendering offers a "low-cost" means of deploying standard widgets not only across multiple Java-based frameworks but also to more far-flung environments such as PHP. Sample app at https://saffron.caret.cam.ac.uk/svn/projects/RSFSamples/trunk/AjaxJSON This feature is in very early preview - currently only UIBranchContainer and UIOutput are implemented from the full RSF set, but the complete parse, resolution and render cycles are running (plus a few bugs). The parser is currently based on a standard XML pull parser and hence is not very performant, but we will be working with Fluid to implement one which is more powerful and efficient. Please do try out this release and report any issues/requests to the RSF forums. A full release will be available within a month or two, prior to the final significant release of RSF, 0.8. Cheers, Antranig. ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
