The new branch for prototype 1.6 is now ok and runs Slidy smoothly, which is a good test application !
I think the patch will be integrated for the 0.9.0 but we still have to do some work for 0.8.0 release before :)
After the 0.9.0 release, I may maintain a Prototype 1.5 compatible version, thanks to Mercurial :D
P.S.: I've mis-pushed the prototype 1.6 patch on the current official tip... will remove it ASAP !
Ok, it's a while I've not posted here (again !) but we're still working on Archetype, don't worry :)
Swiip has made so much documentation for 0.8.0 (you can have a look at http://archetypejs.org/snapshot ) that we had to push the 0.8.0 release to some other day in order to do all the checks and reviews needed.
Have you ever wanted a Prototype 1.6 compatibility ? It's almost available on one of my test repo, just pull http://freehg.org/u/temsa/archetype-p16/ with your Mercurial client and try to help me (Slidy is not working right now, and I don't understand why) ;)
It's about months I was looking for a better source control manager for coding, experimenting, and hacking Archetype, and we found it !
Our new hero is Mercurial, which will ensure more flexibility and easy cross OS handling with quite good graphical tools for any OS. This is a distributed VCS. So now you can easily start to hack Archetype in your corner and push the result when you want, or do your own patch and maintain it easily. Do whatever you want, you're free :)
Better, Faster, Stronger, we have followed what Mozilla, OpenSolaris, Netbeans and OpenJDK have done some months ago.
Official repository is no more SVN on Sourceforge, but now Mercurial on Assembla . Of course then, we have almost no more interest to keep on staying on sourceforge.net, so we'll probably almost totally move to Assembla.
After months of work, Archetype 0.8 beta is available, and the stable version is targeted for next week (or at least before the end of june).
Change log includes a lot of rewrites, more modularization, better loading system which ables to go from development to wide band production sites with almost nothing to change to get from one to the other, a proof of concept of Log4J like logging system, multiple template system handling( Basic, EJS, DOMTAL, ...) , heterogeneous template system handling for components, and I think I forget almost half of the feature we've done.
Swiip is focusing right now on giving more documentation for the 0.8 release, including a FAQ, more about Graphical Components, and so on.
Have fun !
After a whole day work, I've modularised Archetype bootstrap dependencies in order to load just what is needed to use Archetype as a "Script Loader" only.
It has been tested this evening on a big project using about hundred of interdependent files successfully without any modification of the framework itself! It's available in the SVN trunk right now :)
This project based upon OpenLayers, with a lot of enhancement using multiple overloading classes files). This project does not use Joiners, nor the Event system, not the Archetype.Class enhancement.
There are now some "expert settings" in the configuration, giving you the ability to load and use only what you need.
This is a great news as Archetype starts to be very very strong on the dependency management side and can be easily used now on any Prototype 1.5.x based application (or not, but it just relies on Prototype 1.5.x).
In a script loading only configuration, the framework takes about 34kb totally uncompressed (with a lot of comments for JsDoc).
Using a JSmin(a basic JavaScript compressor) pass, it shrinks down to 15kb, and if your using the HTTP1.1 GZip compression on your web server, it's no more than a 4.8kb that will be used to go on the client!
Awesome, isn't it ? ;)
We've found that we needed a real brain storm about how we'll resolve modules URL and dependencies through configuration file.
Archetype.require is one of the oldest methods of Archetype. Many functionnalities have been added. To manage all configurations like "submodules", "needs", "aPath" and "rPath" we completed and complexified this method. It made it become a real mess and it's pretty hard to understand and maintain.
Configurations need a real recursive analysis but old require was not completely recursive (however you had to do a complex configuration to encounter any problem) and that's why we had that famous first bug on our JIRA: AJF-1.
I have extracted the resolution of modules names in the require parameter to correctly handle a recursive configuration and manage layers to order dependency loading.
Require is now really much more complete and robust and can handle any exotic configurations.
In the same evolution, I've seen that our UMN (Unique Module Name) object was used every time we needed to extract realPath or URL of the module. I transformed the $U function from returning UMN object to the URL String to simplify coding. It causes many internal refactoring but any changes for final user.
I've just committed these new functionality. It implies many changes like variables refactoring and jsdocs comment review but it's fully working.
Just a little news to say I've moved the blog to http://blog.archetypejs.org.
Besides that, I'm working on the next tutorials part, and Swiip is achieving a major internal move to split UMN resolving & files downloading. It will ease Unit Tests, be stronger, be cleaner and will solve the AJF-1 bug (great job Swiip !).
Since latest release, Archetype has received on it's official website almost half of the earth countries :) !
Some detailed view about France and the USA :
Ok, definitively not my best performance at all (too tired, too stressed, or whatever other excuse can be invoked ;D ), but here's my FOSDEM 2008 Lightning talk about Archetype.
As FOSDEM is for developers, I've shortened the presentation part in order to show a bit some part of the code behind the presentation itself : Slidy, this little app, made in about 2-3 hours (not including the CSS Adaptation for the FOSDEM and images around it) that just handle slide changes without any effect but a page counter.
I promise to do better next time, it was my first presentation in English with around 100 people in the room ;)
I've spent my whole day working on images, Maven site template, and CSS of archetypejs.org.
Hope you'll find it cool !
