New diagrams

For a recent presentation of Archetype, we wanted to use new versions of our positioning and architecture diagrams.

Here it's a preview of these up to date representations:

First the Archetype positioning:


The global Archetype application architecture:

Both will be soon added on the website.

Archetype 0.10.0 is out !!!

At first, we thought that the 0.9.3 would be the latest of the 0.x series, but our standard for features and quality are very high. So, we decided to wait for our "compiler" and some major improvement on components to be ready, well tested and with a stable API to throw the 1.0.

So, after some months of development (started around the 1/20/2009) and after more than 200 commits, 0.10.0 is here !

Here is the change log :

- Archetype engine abstraction (aka jQuery support !!!)

- New Maven website enriched with Archetype !

- Complete documentation!

- Switch to Dojo unit test engine: Dojo objective Harness

- Archetype.charset now defines the script charset (in order to ensure there is no bug with IE6,
if you want to change this, please add the charset variable in the Archetype namespace in archetype.js itself)

** Bug

* [AJF-69] - Make script charset configurable
* [AJF-72] - Event with null data doesn't work with Prototype engine

** Improvement

* [AJF-13] - Switch to another JS Unit Test framework
* [AJF-70] - Improve Maven website
* [AJF-73] - Replace custom event library by engine native implementations

** New Feature

* [AJF-10] - A real Documentation
* [AJF-63] - Run Archetype on top of jQuery


Known bugs:

- You may experience some troubles using firebugLogger and IE 8 developer tools or Opera Dragonfly
- Due to a bug in Dojo objective Harness, unit tests for Safari 4 aren't conclusive

Parallel works

There is a lot going on right now on our project! (Thanks to Mercurial for keeping up with all the merges we have been doing.)

Temsa is working on the new skin and home page of our next web site. We’re working particularly hard on it for release 0.10 in order to give visitors a better first impression.

Meanwhile, I will soon be done writing the documentation. Archetype release 0.10 will be the first one to be fully documented, even though we still have a few additional ideas to complete the documentation, by describing different use cases for Archetype for example.

Caroline joined Archetype recently to help us improve our English expression (and maybe for development some day? :D). All of us are French and Archetype is fully written in English so we are trying our best to have error-free English pages.

As you can see, Zed is now able to concatenate all of Archetype’s files: JavaScript, components, templates and CSS, using a smart trick of emulating Archetype with HtmlUnit to obtain the sorted file list. He’s already starting to look at more powerful features like compression, code coverage or image bundling.

Finally, most of 0.11’s features (explained in the "New Components" post) are already developed. Branch 0.11 also contains needed improvements to work with the compiler (like the ability to insert templates in JavaScript without using an XHR request).

Stay tuned for more on release 0.10 which will soon be out!