Since last release the Ajax.org Platform core team worked very hard to improve the stability of APF3.0. Besides the code itself, the docs and tools on Ajax.org are more complete and less error prone. For this release more than a hundred jira issues were solved and about 500 issues never made it to jira and were solved immediately.

A couple of highlights of this release are:

• The Property Editor is reimplemented with APF native components
• Actions with auto-undo is fixed
• Transaction support is fixed
• Sync http support is fixed
• All the skins are cleaned up and new windows skins are introduced
• Many documentation issues, that were mostly due to doc parse errors, are fixed. This includes all functions on the apf object and parameter descriptions of methods.
• Overall stability has increased a lot

Please find the downloads at the new download page: http://www.ajax.org/#download.
And the improved documentation at http://www.ajax.org/#docs.

I hope you will enjoy this release and find many of the reported problems solved. Any suggestions and comments are highly appreciated, either below this article or on the Ajax.org forum.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ipom/4098347932/in/set-72157622643717073/

of me and mike (www.mikedeboer.nl)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blank22763/4089181805/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blank22763/4089174871/in/photostream/

and here of Douglas, Malte and Kris in front of our stand
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blank22763/4089174871/in/photostream/

More pictures/videos coming soon, but first, sleep!

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As you might’ve read somewhere, APF3.0 will make it easy to create collaborative applications. Think google wave, but now you have full control over the UI. The big thing about collaborative is the real time factor. When realtime data comes in you want to see the changes live coming into your user interface. This is where live markup comes in.

We’re currently integrating live markup in the new version of the www.ajax.org demo section. The following snippet shows how I use it to create a user interface based on example data coming from the server. I’ll go into more details in another blog article. For the moment notice the following things that live markup introduces:

• xPath literal using [ and ]
• XML literal using < and > (remember E4X ?)
• Auto-concatenation and Auto-output

There’s more to it, but thats the gist of it. Check out the example below. I hope you can appreciate the elegance that Live Markup brings to creating real time user interfaces for collaborative applications. More information to follow soon. We’re planning to release a first beta of 3.0 next week.

<?lm
  <h1>[@name]</h1>

  var i = 0;
  foreach([example]) {
    <h2>Example {++i}</h2>
    <div class="description">
      [description]
    </div>

    <a:tab skin="demos_lowtab" width="653">
      <a:page caption="Demo">
        {"*[source/node()]"}
      </a:page>
      <a:page caption="Code (AML)" render="runtime">
        <pre class="code">
          {apf.highlightCode("*[source/node()]")}
        </pre>
      </a:page>
      <a:page caption="Code (JS)" render="runtime">
        <pre class="code">
          {convertToJsonApi(%[.])}
        </pre>
      </a:page>
      {
        foreach([xml]) {
          <a:page caption="[caption]" render="runtime">
            <pre class="code">
              {apf.highlightCode("*[source/node()]")}
            </pre>
          </a:page>
        }
        foreach([js]) {
          <a:page caption="[caption]" render="runtime">
            <pre class="code">
              [source/text()]
            </pre>
          </a:page>
        }
      }
    </a:tab>
  }
?>

This snippet would operate on a piece of xml like this.

Imagine the data updating live from the server and being automatically reflected in your UI. That’s the type of application we aim to make easy to build.

Hope to see you there!

Authentication is always a hard problem for any web application. For an Ajax application it’s even more complex. Imagine you make a request which gives you an access denied, what state should the application be in? And when the user logs in again, how can the request - or requests that happened while not being logged in - be retried?

This is where jpf.auth comes in. It helps you to set up authentication for your entire application in a declarative manner. First, let’s look at how to set-up basic login and logout teleport methods, to which the auth element can connect to.
(more…)

First we create a list with some inline binding rules. For this example we are using a list with mode=”check” and mode=”radio” set. The mode sets the behaviour of the list, “check” to function as a list of checkboxes, “radio” to function as a list of radiobuttons.

<j:list id="lstExample1"
    mode     = "check"
    model    = "mdlData:question1"
    caption  = "text()"
    traverse = "item" />
<j:list id="lstExample2"
    mode     = "radio"
    model    = "mdlData:question2"
    caption  = "text()"
    traverse = "item" />

We can now add the model to our application:
(more…)