0.9.2 is out, what's going on next ?

Yes 0.9.2 is out there, here's the changelog :
--
- Fixed synchronous require, however please don't use it, it's 99.99% of the time
a bad idea (it's freezing the browser)
- I18n fix for Internet Explorer
- Added a configuration for script charset. Don't forget that, in IE, script
charset should be the same as the page one!
- More Unit Tests, including script charset

Fixed:
** Bug
* [AJF-62] - synchronous require isn't ok


** New Feature
* [AJF-61] - CLONE -extended i18n support (number format, translating etc) (PARTIAL)
--

Besides this release, the 0.10.0 is on the rails (I know, rubysh joke ! ). It is focusing on engine abstraction between Prototype 1.6 and jQuery 1.3. Meanwhile, Francois seems working on an i18n patch and this may lead to a 0.9.3 :)

0.10 is now almost ready but we're trying to find a good way to handle Slidy, which makes use of Scriptaculous too. We have mainly 2 ways to support Slidy with both engine: writing a compatibility wrapper mapping Scriptaculous when using Prototype, and jQuery UI when using jQuery, or work on an advanced CSS Transition/Transform Shimmering like the one we saw on Ajaxian a few days ago ( http://ajaxian.com/archives/css-transitions-shim-getting-transition-support-into-other-browsers ) or other shims like transformie ( http://paulbakaus.com/2008/08/16/bringing-css-transform-to-internet-explorer/ ). Another option would be to check if there is an animation implementation or gracefully degrades to no animation.

I've currently played a bit with css transform on my netbook using Firefox 3.1b2, Crossover Chromium and Midori, and this is just great (and FF 3.1 is blazing fast compared to 3.0 on a netbook), even on a damn small computer!

Well, meanwhile this Slidy focus (I'll try to implement at least a temporary solution for the end of the week) Swiip has started a new branch (http://bitbucket.org/Swiip/archetype-components/) in order to enhance components to prepare them for the 1.0.

Multiple objectives for this branch:

- improve component loading, in order to be able to bundle them in one file

- if possible, do what is needed in order for the name attribute to be optional

- implement behaviors ( see AJF-18 : http://bug.archetypejs.org/jira/browse/AJF-18 ). we'll probably map around the dojo.behavior ( http://docs.dojocampus.org/dojo/behavior ) spec, but in a total declarative way: simple, and already bound to the component ( main drawback of this approach without a component, as supported by Joeri on Ajaxian : http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-behavior-sheet ).

- component cascading : auto-adding, instanciating and anchoring a component referenced in a template (may just be auto-anchoring a already referenced component in the dependencies). May be done as a default behavior when defining a "archetype:component" attribute to an element(what do you think of that ?).

This branch will probably be merged as the 0.11.0 or 1.0, as it may lead to some compatibility break.

It's a while now :)

Deer blog,

It's a long, long, long time, we've not speaked here... Shame on us !

Some news : 0.9.0 is out ! 0.9.1 too ! 0.9.2 will be released very soon (probably tonight :D )

We've worked hard in order for Archetype to be releasable when we want, and, after a stale in the development for some months due to the amount of work we have to achieve to satisfy our goal for 1.0, we then had a lot of good news :

- in fact, all the people we know IRL that has used Archetype in their development are now real fan

- we'll have a new big contributor (Arnaud) to the project in about a week (an intern that will work on Archetype for several month in order to help us reach the 1.0).

- Cedric, an engineer student (that has done an internship with us and has developped a collaborative bookmark application using arcehtype as the only front)is currently developing a "java on rails" project on top of Maven, using good frameworks (Hibernate/Spring/DWR), and wether a Flex, an Archetype or a Tapestry 5 front.

- Francois De Metz is our first external contributor, he has improved Unit Tests and some of our code, but also created some new unit tests :)

Besides all of this, we are working hard on a jQuery compatible version of Archetype, including a basic layer abstraction in order to use the same code in Archetype using Prototype or jQuery for it's base. This will lead certainly to a next major version, which will probably be 0.10.0

The 1.0 will have a lot of feature including a lot of tools in order to optimize file loading in production, using bundling and css sprite on top of archetype to achieve better loading times.

Enjoy !

See you soon for the 0.9.2 release :D