The Prototype 1.6 headaches

You may have notice that we haven't switched yet to Prototype 1.6.x.

There are many reasons to this, and the main one is that Prototype has broken the compatibility ( http://prototypejs.org/api/hash ) with the original Hashmap format. This leads to some problems as we are used to enhance basic Hashmap to prototype ones when needed, particularly for the whole files loading process...

We often use hashmaps to define namespaces, and the new hashmap format leads to a particurlarly bad (for this purpose) new syntax to acces members.

We're looking for some good ways to handle this, and the new $H instruction (compared to the old one) has some interest: it's quick, make a "copy" of the original map (in facts it keeps the same reference to objects, and just copies strings and numbers) and gives a good way to come back to an "plain old" hashmap after prototype functions has been used.

So I'm working to find a good solution to use Prototype 1.6, and I even think of changing some backends (like object creations and custom events) to Prototype 1.6 ones. Not very easy to say at the moment whether I'll do this or not.

New template systems in the trunk !

We now have totally abstracted the template system used to render a template!

SVN Archetype provides 3 back end right now in the trunk:

• Our original basic system based on regexp. It is simple and cannot do complicated stuff by itself, however, a view is not designed to do complicated things, so that's not a bad idea to keep this simple.
• The template system from trimPath template: the project seems to lack of activity since 2005, however it's a stable version of a powerful template system using a Smarty like syntax, and we'll try to work together with the trimPath team to support it and improve it :)
• The TAL template system with it's implementation domtal, which uses the browsers ability to parse xml. TAL is used in the Zope Template system (ZPT) and is one of greatest template system I know.

This may lead to a near futur release (0.1.6 ?)

EDIT: After discussing with Ivan Montes, current DOMTAL maintainer, the latest version is here and should be quite better. Ivan does not maintain it anymore, and we may maintain it for now. This little file lost on the web may lead to an opensource success story (well, I'm just thinking about the jRuby conference which had the same kind of story :) )

Archetype 0.1.5 is out!

We just released the 0.1.5 version. This versions correct lots of bug, simplify lots of writings, and improve compatibility!

We decide to call it 0.1.5 because we have now a lot of corrections and improvements since the 0.1.0. We don't have all the stuff we expect for the 0.2.0 so we will waiting before tagging 0.2.0.

You can download the new version on the official Archetype website : http://archetypejs.org/

New http://archetypejs.org/ online

We published the new official website for Archetype : http://archetypejs.org/.
We just choose a new logo for the framework, thanks to Marc for created it for us!

With the Maven integration of Archetype we have been able to use the site generation system.
We filled all parameters of the project information, so the site can redirect on all resources of the project. We also added some presentations pages and others useful links. We will add more documentations in the future.

As Florian posted just before, with the new site, we can automatically publish jsdoc and jslint reports.

See you on http://archetypejs.org/!

JsDoc Available !

Archetype's current trunk, that will result imminently to a release, has now a viewable jsDoc !

After some comment rewrite, and using a hacked svn jsdoc-2 version, I've obtained the jsDoc of the framework : http://archetypejs.org/jsdoc/

Archetype presented during the lightning talks at FOSDEM

Archetype has been selected (like 33 other project of 70 proposals) for a lightning talk at the 2008 FOSDEM !

The talk will present the framework to a wide community of (big ?) hackers at 15h20 on Sunday 02/24/2008.

Great! :D