SISCweb

File Release Notes and Changelog

Release Name: 0.5

Notes:
This is  release 0.5 of SISCweb.

In addition to the source code, a small collection of simple examples
is provided as a war file "siscweb-examples-0.5.war" which can be
deployed in any recent J2EE server (e.g. tomcat 5.x) running under
Java 1.4.


Changes:
2007-04-12: v0.5

This release adds a space-safe implementation of Web Cells,
consolidates the interface from Scheme to JSP/Servlets, and provides
some incremental features and fixes.


FEATURES

- An implementation of web cells, as as described in the paper
  "Interaction-Safe State for the Web"
  (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mk-int-safe-state-web/). New
  examples now help compare web cells, SRFI-39 parameters,
  state-passing-style and session attributes with respect to scope,
  backtracking and cloning.

- Much improved interface from SISCweb to JSPs and other standard
  J2EE components:
        - Bindings can now be explicitely single-valued or
          multi-valued, as in:

              `((a . 1) (b 2 3)).

        - The send-forward/* functions pass bindings to the dispatcher
          as request attributes for easy access via the JSTL and the
          like. Multi-valued bindings are passed as collection
          objects.

        - Vice-versa, attributes in a request forwarded to a Scheme
          program are now included in the bindings structure returned
          by get-bindings.

        - The SISCHttpServletRequest.getBinding*() methods are
          deprecated, and will disappear in the next release.

- Added publish/regexp to publish procedures using regular
  expressions. Sub-expressions can be optionally mapped to procedure
  parameters.

- The SISC libraries (sisc.jar, etc.) can now be shared across servlet
  contexts.

- Miscellanea:
    * better compliance of plain HTML output via send-html/*;
    * added siscweb/text module for generating plain text;
    * added sql/mssql module from LShift's Icing [*];
    * logging rotation;
    * further internal refactoring and compatibility fixes.


FIXES

After a context restart, continuation tables persisted within sessions
were not being purged of expired continuations. This was partially
fixed in v0.4 by limiting the number of continuations per user, but is
now completely resolved.


LOOKING AHEAD

Objectives for the next SISCweb releases are:

- Faster SXML generation, precompiled if possible.

- Further work on including features from the  Icing framework.

- Performance improvements, possibly including clustering.


THANKS

Special thanks for this release go to Dan Muresan for his
contributions, and Ben Simon for bug reports.


[*] Icing: http://www.lshift.net/icing
The complete Icing db layer is included in a "dormant" state. It is
mainly intended as a baseline for further hacking.