JPublish Newsletter for March 2003

Welcome to the March edition of the JPublish Monthly Newsletter.  The JPublish Monthly Newsletter is published via email once per month to keep everyone up-to-date on the current state of JPublish development. If you would like to see anything in particular added to this newsletter please let me know.  On with the show:

----------------------------
Recent News

JPublish 2.0b1 was released on February 11th.  The first beta release of JPublish 2.0 represents some significant advancements in the JPublish framework.  One of the most important changes is support for template engines other than Velocity.  The pluggable-view support in JPublish 2.0 is an important step towards increased recognition and use of the framework by developers.  Currently JPublish 2.0 supports Velocity, FreeMarker and WebMacro.  Developing new view implementations is as simple as implementing the org.jpublish.view.ViewRenderer interface and registering your view renderer in the jpublish.xml configuration.  More information on this feature will be included in the new documentation.

Speaking of which another major developing in JPublish 2.0 is a brand new User's Guide which can be found in the JPublish CVS in jpublish/docs/guide.html .  You can also get to this documentation through the JPublish Wiki: http://www.jpublish.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JPublish2.0 .  Incindentally this the JPublish Wiki is also a good source of information about other upcoming changes in JPublish 2.0.

Finally I would like to welcome the Open For Business developers ( http://www.ofbiz.org ) to the JPublish community.  OFBiz has decided to use JPublish for the web tier of the OFBiz application suite.  Both David Jones and Andy Zeneski have already contributed significant amounts to JPublish 2.0 and I look forward to further improvements thanks to their ongoing contributions.

----------------------------
Work in Progress

JPublish 2.0 development is in full swing at the moment.  Thanks to the input from numerous developers JPublish 2.0 will not only offer improved functionality but it will also provide improved performance.  Some performance enhancements include support for caching by templating engines (this is already complete for Velocity and FreeMarker) and improved static resource management (including proper use of the Last-Modified HTTP header).  Thank you to those who have already contributed suggestions and code on improving JPublish performance.  

Another important feature of JPublish 2.0 which I would like to mention is the addition of internal URIs for looking up content.  I believe that this may finally be the key to providing a unified content API.  I will follow up on this in a future edition of the JPublish Newsletter.

One final note: JPublish 2.0b2 is right around the corner so stay tuned.  If you are interested in contributing code to JPublish 2.0 now is the time to speak up.  Send an email to the mailing list or to me and let's get the ball rolling.

----------------------------
Tip of the Month

Did you know that you can have multiple repositories in your web applications?  The example web application that ships with JPublish demonstrates one possible use of multiple repositories.  Specifically, the JPublish example uses a repository called xml_repository as a means for reading and writing XML documents to and from the file system!  What do you mean you didn't know that repositories support writing to the file system?  Actually, this feature is disabled by default but for a FileSystemRepository it can be enabled by using the following XML in your jpublish.xml configuration:

 <repository name="my_repository" classname="org.jpublish.repostory.filesystem.FileSystemRepository">
    <root>myrepository</root>
    <write-allowed>true</write-allowed>
 </repository>


Have your own tip for other JPublish users?  Drop me an email with your tip or add it to the JPublish Wiki and I may include your tip in a future newsletter.

----------------------------

That's it for now.  Until next month, happy coding!

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Etnus, makers of TotalView, The debugger 
for complex code. Debugging C/C++ programs can leave you feeling lost and 
disoriented. TotalView can help you find your way. Available on major UNIX 
and Linux platforms. Try it free. www.etnus.com