JPublish Monthly Newsletter

Happy New Year! Welcome to the first edition of the JPublish Monthly 
Newsletter.  I am going to try to send out one newsletter 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:

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Recent News

The last release of JPublish occured on December 1st, 2002.  JPublish 
1.4 included a couple of new features:

 - Replaced the Page class with PageInstance.  There is only one 
PageInstance per page path.  The Page class now wraps the PageInstance 
class.  The reason for this was to provide request-specific page 
features which are separate from page attributes which are specified in 
the pages XML configuration.  This includes the addition of getLocale() 
and setLocale() to the Page class.  Page property accessors now use the 
Page Locale.
 - Added org.jpublish.util.NumberUtilities and 
org.jpublish.util.DateUtilities classes and exposed as numberUtilities 
and dateUtilites in the context.

If you haven't already, perhaps you should give JPublish 1.4 a try.

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

JPublish 1.5 should be released in the near future.  The code has been 
cleaned up quite a bit and the logging will now use the Apache Commons 
Logging library.  This should make it easier to switch logging providers 
in the future.  Another interesting addition is the WebRepository which 
will pull content from other web sites.

JPublish 2

I have been spending a lot of time recently on brainstorming for 
JPublish 2.  One thing which is very important to me is to improve the 
usabilty of JPublish.  To address this I am working on a component 
system which will be added to JPublish to a.) allow easier design of 
templates and b.) provide better resuse of common elements, like news 
boxes, login screens, etc.  This change will potentially include changes 
to the way templates include content by replacing the current use of 
Velocity, as in $fs_repository.get($page.Path) with something more 
friendly like <component id="body">Dummy text</component>.  This would 
allow designers to provide mock templates and should make templates 
easier to understand.  What do you think?

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

Since JPublish 1.3 it has been possible to execute actions before 
request evaluation and after request evaluation.  Pre-evaluation actions 
are especially useful because they allow you to execute actions *before* 
the page lookup occurs.  You can use this to execute actions and then 
redirect to another page without requiring an actual page configuration 
to exist.  Another possible use would be to restrict access to static 
resources which have no page configuration.  Check out my weblog entry 
on protecting JavaScript for more information on this ( 
http://www.freeroller.net/page/aeden/20021123#technique_for_protecting_javascript_code 
) Post evaluations can be used to execute cleanup code after the output 
is already flushed to the web browser, providing a means for improving 
application responsiveness.

Have your own tip for other JPublish users?  Drop me an email and I will 
include your tip in a future newsletter.

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

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

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden



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