Niggle web application framework / News: Recent posts

A preview release of version 1.1 of the Niggle Web Application Framework is available. Niggle is a 100% java library that allows a clean separation of concerns -- between your HTML presentation layer and your database back-end.

For more details, see http://www.niggle.org/

The latest release of the Niggle Web App Framework can now be used in conjunctin with the Velocity template engine from Jakarta. This means that Niggle can now be used in conjunction with 3 popular open-source template libraries: Freemarker, WebMacro, and Velocity.

Release 1.02 of the Niggle Web Application Framework
is available. It includes a new data source implementation
based on an XML storage format. There are some fixes to
the WebMacro bridge code and some other assorted bug fixes.

The Niggle 1.0 "final" that I released 3 days ago had a show-stopping bug. It was minor thing, but would have made all the tutorial examples unrunnable. This is now fixed.
There are a couple of other very minor fixes in the pipeline and you can expect 1.01 in a day or 2.

Niggle 1.0 final has been released with experimental support for the WebMacro template library. The default is still Freemarker, but now you have a choice!

I have just put up Niggle version 1.0 RC3. The next
release is almost certainly 1.0 final. This release
is almost entirely centered around documentation. The tutorials are better and the javadoc is more complete pretty much across the board.

The other big improvement is that I have provided DTD's for the XML-based metadata configuration files. The initialization code validates against the DTD, so you often get better explanations of why certain configuration files don't work.
Also, you can run the validation separately to check
that things are more or less okay.

This release has significant improvements over RC1.

Much progress has been made on the database-independence front. Truth told, I was really rather naive about these issues before, and it is likely that
the only DBMS that previous versions would work with was MySQL. It still can be a bear to get your stuff working against the database of your choice, but I think it's possible. I have managed to get Niggle-based webapps working against 3 different database backends now.... read more

A free web-based forum app has been released as part of the Niggle project. (See
http://sourceforge.net/projects/niggle ) This app was written mainly to show off the Niggle framework. It is only 600 lines of java code, but it is not a toy app by any means. It has most of the key elements of that kind of discussion board/forum sort of web application:

visuals are configurable in external HTML templates (all Niggle apps have this feature)
login/signup/session tracking
storage/retrieval to/from flat files or an external database (this last point is configurable)
a tree view of ongoing discussions.... read more

This is a new Niggle release with some significant improvements to the JDBC bridge code.
Notably, the default JDBC MutableDataSource implementation can be configured so that
it will automagically create your tables with the right structure, based on your Record metadata
configured in XML. (This is a BIG feature.) It has only been tested against MySQL currently though. I anticipate issues running against other RDBMS engines (there always are) and would like to be informed about any issues anyone runs up against.... read more

Release 1.0pre7 of the Niggle application framework is available for download. This is really just a bug-fix release. This version makes sure that Niggle data records with non-Western characters can be serialized and deserialized correctly (previous versions used the readLine() method in ObjectInputStream, which does not handle character encodings). Also, a freemarker template subclass was introduced which is locale-aware. (This will probably be donated to the Freemarker project.) Probably none of this affects anybody who was not supporting non-Western-European languages.

Version 1.0 pre6 of the Niggle Web Application Framework includes some
extra support for multilingual web applications. A minimal example of a
multilingual web application built on top of Niggle has been added to
the examples directory. Also, the Hello, Niggle tutorial now has
been translated to French.

The main improvement is much improved tutorial examples. This was lacking before.
Also the first two (of the three) examples have documentation in Spanish as well as English.