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The forthcoming Porcupine release includes a whole new bunch of exciting features and improvements. This is a list of the most significant:
At last the new version of Porcupine is released. During the past months, I have put a lot of effort for making this release finally available. It includes a new whole bunch of new features and improvements, mainly aimed towards scalability.
Porcupine v0.5.2 is finally here. This release includes the brand new version of QuiX supporting the latest releases of Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers but also introduces a couple of new exciting enhancements. A popular request for QuiX has always been an effects module. This release has a new small effects module that initially supports fade, wipe and slide effects. Furthermore, the newest version includes an enhanced list view widget implementation with no more wobbling headers and great support for large datasets by using asynchronous rendering. Finally, the base widget class has a new "query" method for performing advanced queries on the widgets hierarchy and a new auto complete widget contribution.
The last month mabber
seemed to be facing some major problems. Therefore, I wasn't able to chat with you online. This week it seems to be back online. When I accessed my account I saw all the initiated chat sessions that I had missed. Two of them were about universal browser support for QuiX and the roadmap behind this.
I don't know when QuiX is going to be ported to Konqueror but I know that Opera support has to be put in place ASAP after implementing the first set of the scalability improvements.
Thus, the Opera fanatics (including my friend amusic) can stay assured that soon they won't have to switch to another browser in order to use Porcupine and QuiX based applications.
The next version of Porcupine - hopefully to be released in October - will include the new version of QuiX that supports the Safari browser. When I started developing this new feature, I never realized how beneficial it would turn out in the mean time.
I have just created a new downloads section dedicated to QuiX custom widgets. I have initially included two QuiX custom widgets; a ruler and a flash video player.
The new release of QuiXSampler is available for download. Most of the changes introduced can be found in the splitters' section, since the splitter widgets now derive from boxes.
QuiXSampler can be downloaded from the Porcupine applications' downloads or viewed online using the newly upgraded Porcupine demo.
In order to install it, consult the inno:wiki.
This release is a major breakthrough for Porcupine. The two main new concepts introduced on the server side are the services and the web methods. Porcupine's architecture is now based on configurable services running over a common object database. Currently, the supported service types include an asynchronous network server and a scheduler used for executing Python code at predefined fixed intervals. In the upcoming releases there are plans for new service types to be added including persistent queues, loggers etc.
Web methods have replaced servlets completely and they are actually smart Python decorators which allow you to add methods to content classes dynamically (a technique also known as 'monkey-patching'). These methods become directly accessible over HTTP and they are mainly used for serving all kinds of UIs and RPC requests. Consequently, this release does dot include servlets of any type meaning that you have to migrate your applications manually.
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