"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We originally made a branch in order to implement Prototype 1.6 compatibility as an experiment for the 0.9.0...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 !

Better late than never: the 0.1.0 -0.1.5 Changelog

History:

02/23/2008 - 0.1.5 : More compatibility, industrialised with Maven,
improvements :

- Enhanced the bodyLogger to take more than one argument
- Enhanced Slidy to handle (at least on FF) previous/next slide via left/right key
- Added a namespace for Archetype Classes : ComponentManager, Components, Class etc. are now in Archetype.ComponentManager, etc. (this was the only solution for Archetype to work with Firefox3, as Components is defined by the browser itself)
- Added a new alias : $C for Achetype.Component
- Avoided any share of "_private" between same prototyped components (was a bug)
- Added the _ alias to Prototype.emptyFunction
- Added a default rootEquivalence in order not to have to define it always (keeped it configurable though)
- Added absolute path management for modules
- Added options by url loading (scriptaculous like) notably to be able to force a particular page controller
- Bug corrected : loading with many file with the same "module" name
- Refactored the tree to use default maven organisation
- Completly "Mavenised" the project in order to get something more industrial.
- Improved Unittests page (However, we will have to move to a better UnitTest framework)
- Embedded Prototype window Class 1.3. Not use at the moment but could do a great cross browser Logger.
- Improved Templates (Comments, etc.)
- Improved Archetype loading: no more synchronous Ajax (Sjaj if you prefer ^_^) during loading
- Bug corrected: you can now use multiple file with the same name and different extension safely
- Did some work to prepare managed i18n possibilities
- Added the $exist() helper in order to test if what is check is not undfined nor null.
- Created a Maven site with Presentation, documentation, JsDoc and Jslint coverage.
- Improved the JsDoc contained in the code
- Generated some JsDoc with jsDoc toolkit 2.0 SVN
- Prepared the FOSDEM using Slidy. Removed the original Slidy tutorial and moved to the FOSDEM presentation.
- Moved the different libraries used in "libs" directories.

10/18/2007 - 0.1.0 : initial release

Archetype est sorti !

Après des mois de développements, nous sommes fiers de présenter notre première release publique de Archetype JavaScript Framework.

Archetype est un framework JavaScript. Il ne s’agit pas d’un toolkit qui propose de simplifier le code, c’est un vrai framework ! Il est basé sur des librairies d'excellente facture pour lui servir de base : Prototype et Scriptaculous. Il vise à permettre de créer des applications réellement "web 2.0" en offrant une suite de services indispensables pour avoir des logiciels de bonne qualité géré principalement par JavaScript.

Il offre les services suivants:

• Gestion intelligente des dépendances, et chargement de l'ensemble des fichiers du projet pour la page chargée : sur les projets chargés en JavaScript il est courant d'avoir des problèmes de chargement, aussi Archetype prend en charge de manière simple et efficace tous les chargements de fichiers.
• Améliorations des systèmes objets du JavaScript : héritage, singleton, appel des méthodes parentes, fonctions importées, etc.
• Un système de log configurable : JavaScript manque de possibilités de logguer proprement des informations afin de permettre un debogage aisé de l'application : Plusieurs loggers sont disponibles dans le framework, suivant les besoins, et gérés simplement par configuration.
• Un système de template html (ou tout autre format basé sur du texte): il interprète (très rapidement) en JavaScript, et permet ainsi de gérer parfaitement un Modèle Vue-Contrôleur côté client.
• Conteneur léger : un des concepts les plus forts d'Archetype. Ce système de conteneur (appelé Component) offre de nouvelles possibilités au développement JavaScript: description des dépendances et chargement automatiques de celles-ci, stabilité du "this" dans l'objet, services transversaux automatisés basé sur des conventions (et/ou des configurations), proxy pré/post méthode de l'objet, permettant par exemple d'émettre/écouter simplement les événements concernant l'objet.
• Widgets réutilisables : basés sur les "Components", les "GraphicalComponents" permettent de rassembler en un concept simple, un ensemble de fichier css/html/javascript, en widgets réutilisables de page en page et de projet en projet.
• Communication Evènementielle : Grâce à Archetype, il devient simple de communiquer par évènements avec tous les composants, qu'ils se trouvent dans la page elle même ou dans une frame/iframe contenue dans celle-ci!
  

Le projet Archetype a pour but d'offrir au développeur web tous les outils pour travailler en JavaScript comme avec les frameworks serveur, mais sans cacher ce JavaScript dans une couche serveur qui s'avère toujours trop simple pour pouvoir réaliser ce que le client désire.

Archetype offre donc un véritable environnement de travail au développeur, en utilisant les principes des meilleurs outils connus actuellement dans le domaine du développement web et favorise l'utilisation de pratiques reconnues dans un langage qui était alors dépourvu de toutes ces structures qui sont pourtant indispensables à des applications de qualité, faciles à faire évoluer et à maintenir.

Voici la version 0.1.0 qui présente d’ores et déjà le cœur fonctionnel de ce qui est peut être le premier framework JavaScript prévu pour gérer une application RIA et Web 2 de taille conséquente.

Essayez-le !

Nous appliquons déjà notre framework dans divers projet mais nous sommes avides de vos retours et vos commentaires!

Vous pouvez nous joindre et nous faire vos retours sur le Google Group.