"La rentrée" !

We have passed some busy summer holidays, and some announcement will come in the next few days. No comment, the content is a surprise :)

As 0.8.0 beta was based upon the (quite deprecated now) Prototype 1.5, the current "tip" works perfectly using now Prototype 1.6.

We originally made a branch in order to implement Prototype 1.6 compatibility as an experiment for the 0.9.0... But I've "mis-committed" (I've stupidly clicked on the bad repository when pushing the main changes) it on the current tip and continued with it.

The 0.8.0 was at this moment quite ready for a release, but we wanted to document a lot more the use of the framework itself. However, my job is to read and correct the documentation and I prefer a lor more coding than correcting a documentation, so... We did not release during the summer.

However a release is yet ready to go out, but based on Prototype 1.6. It has been quite heavily tested, even on the brand new Chrome, and we are hapopy with the result yet. But yet again we lack of documentation for this new release.

So, I think we will release the 0.9.0 before the 0.8.0 final(!!), because getting the 0.8.0 back from the history, test it, etc. will just be a pain compared to the 0.9.0 release.

Between the 2 releases, the main change is jumping from Prototype 1.5 to Prototype 1.6, we have added some handy tools in the 0.9.0, notably for playing easily with URLs.

Now what do we plan for 1.0 ? It depends. We have purposed an internship in our company focused on working on Archetype, in order to give it some cool tools to help for high trafic website, notably to minify the number of hits for loading the page (so mostly helping for bundling JavaScripts, and maybe help for CSS Sprites).

We have started in 0.8.0, the ability to choose what you want for specific part as a backend. We would like in the future version not to rely just on Prototype, but on any good framework we can use as a backend. We have just started a "secret" JQuery branch in order to see what is possible.

Other good news : a cool new open source project about social bookmarks relying only on Archetype to render the application should be there in some months. We've got a cool working beta version of it at Atos Worldline, but we have to do some work in order to release it as a free software ( we mainly have to avoid the use of our SSO for login). The main author of this project has written a very cool JS Code and I hope to convince him joining the Archetype Team :)

Again using Archetype, I've made a "plug&play" (call it widget if you want, but it's not exactly a widget) system in order to use a Solr ( http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ ) as a cross-domain search tool, that you can use on any web page that has a little form with an input and a submit event. I am working now on integrating Opensearch with it if it's possible.

We are very happy with Archetype can do yet, and we hope it's the same for you!

Much more documentation and Prototype 1.6 coming

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) ;)

Archetype 0.8 beta

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 !