[pfc-users] Status of HEAD branch

[Bavo De R. <ba...@co...>]

Hi,

In the past few weeks some important development steps have been taken with 
HEAD. HEAD is the bleeding edge development branch in CVS. PFC_0_9_DSP 
remains the stable branch and will only receive bug fixes and minor feature 
releases, it can be considered a 1.0 branch.

The new binding API is growing steadily towards a mature API. You can already 
bind all sort of data sources to list boxes for instance. Running examples 
show this being done with a CSV file source and a hibernate query source.

Some of you already saw a first implementation of session management. Sessions 
can be manipulated in a way very similar to Windows Terminal Server.

Today, I took the step to finally split the pfc-core module into two new 
modules: pfc-api for the public api and pfc-rt for the (hidden) runtime. At 
first I was afraid this task would take several days if not weeks, mostly due 
to cyclic dependencies between the two parts. Luckily however this was not 
the case and the split could be accomplished in less then 4 hours. The 
pfc-core module is deprecated in the HEAD branch.

The split immediately showed some areas where I could improve the code with 
some simple refactoring patterns. Especially the rendering api and runtime 
has become much cleaner. All the RenderContext subclasses could be removed as 
well as the HtmlGraphics class, their functionality has been collapsed onto a 
single interface: IRenderContext which is implemented once in the runtime. 
Object creation has also dramatically decreased in the rendering phase (there 
are for instance no stacked RenderContext classes being instantiated for 
every component that required rendering).

I hope this overview gave you some insights into the current status of the PFC 
library and shows that it is still actively developed.

-- 
Bavo De Ridder

Visit the project pages:
	http://pfc.coderspotting.org/
        http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pfc