JPublish Monthly Newsletter

Welcome to the February 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:

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Recent News

JPublish 1.4.1 was released on Tuesday, February 4th and provides a security fix for a potential JPublish security hole which allows parameter actions to execute any action on the site if the attacker knows the name of the action.  As of JPublish 1.4.1 parameter actions are disabled by default.  You can enable them with a single line in your jpublish.xml file.  A future version of JPublish will provide more fine-grained control for which actions can be executed via parameters.  If you are currently using JPublish 1.4 I strongly suggest that you download and install JPublish 1.4.1.

I have installed a Wiki on the JPublish web server so that we can all have a place to store JPublish-related information which should be shared with other developers.  The site is running JSPWiki and already contains a few pages with some information about JPublish 2.0 and JPublish sightings.  Please drop by the Wiki at http://www.jpublish.org/wiki/ and help contribute to the content.

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Work in Progress

Well, I said I was going to release JPublish 1.5 in the near future but have decided to designate the next release as 2.0.  The code has been cleaned up quite a bit and the logging now uses the Apache Commons Logging library.  JPublish 2.0 adds a new view abstraction layer so that you can plug in alternative view rendering engines.  Velocity will remain the default engine for JPublish.  In addition to Velocity you can now use FreeMarker and WebMacro, as well as a raw renderer for disabling view parsing altogether.  The component system is also in place although I haven't had time to test it yet.  Last month I mentioned using a syntax such as <component id="id"></component> to represent a component.  Initially I am going to provide all components via the context so that you can just do something like:

  $components.MyComponent

But in the future I would still like to provide a more HTML-like syntax.  The main goal here is to let designers easily insert components with dummy content into the web page so they can get a better feel for how the content will layout.

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Tip of the Month

Did you know that JPublish includes several utility classes which are automatically inserted into the context for use in your views?  URLUtilities contains methods for creating secure and normal URLs which are context relative and is accessible via the name $urlUtilities.  JPublish 1.4 added two new utilities.  DateUtilities includes methods for formatting dates and is accessible via the name $dateUtilities while NumberUtilities includes methods for formatting numbers and is accessible via the name $numberUtilities.

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.

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

Sincerely,
Anthony Eden



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