WARFARE / News: Recent posts

It's all been a bit quiet on the western front. I have however been working behind the scenes on an upgrade to Java 5/6 and Tomcat 5.5/6. This has needed some re-factoring to take Generics into account (I hate seeing compiler warnings) so I am trying to test it a bit more thoroughly. Hopefully not long now before I kick out a 1.2 version. Keep looking.

After many months of minor tweaks it is now finaly worth releasing a new version.

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New in the 1.1 SP 1 Release
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Fixed a minor bug with the link mode.
Added an improved PM2 demo app.
Added the PM2 demo to the portal demo.

I have finalised the 1.1 Release finaly.
I have:
Added Targeting feature to the Portlet interface.
Added an example portal application using jetspeed2.
Added configurable link modes.

This Release adds a JSR-168 compliant Portlet to provide access to warfare views from within any compatible portal.

After a long wait I have finaly released 1.1 Beta 2.
There have been a few minor tweaks here and there to improve consistancy and usability

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New in the 1.1b2 Release
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Updated the SQL that selects allowed views based on changes suggested by LukeT.
Updated the scheduler code to make it use 24 hour clock.
Added a very simple chat room type thing to the intranet.
Made the ViewHandler throw a 404 when the template isn't there.
Fixed a broken link in the test app.
Added testConnection strings to the connection pools created in
the warfare.xml.
Fixed some things to accessing views via SelectView works a bit
neater. (This provides a nice stripped down interface for mobile viewing.... read more

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New in the 1.1b1 Release
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Tidied up some of the layouts for consistency between applications.
Added an application table to logically group views and layouts for export and import features. Added an XML Export just need to figure out how to import it.
A Lucene plug-in has been added to enable easy text searching of records. The intranet demo has been extended to make use of this functionality
Serious re-organise of the SQL scripts to minimise the use of postgress specific sequence commands. The unique ids are now allocated by setting the default for the field to be nextval('sequence_name') and all insert
scripts have been modified to accomodate this. This should ease any migration to other databases by minimising the chnages needed to support alternative unique id generation methods like mysqls auto_increment field types.
The code has been moved about a bit to create more meaningful packages and the SQL scripts and modules have been updated to reflect the changes

The 1.1 Alpha 3 release has finaly made it.

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New in the 1.1a3 Release
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Added a basic scheduler component that can execute views at regular intervals which can be used to generate reports or other asyncrhronous tasks.
Added the ability to specify default values for fields in the database.
Added a few bits to make it easier to use javascript form validation without having to define record templates for every form you need to validate.
Updated some of the context.xml to work with Tomcat 5.0.25 it should still work with older versions as I didn't need to change much.
Modified the build scripts to work with ant 1.6.1 (concat behaves slightly differently and broke the viewmanager.properties) again it should work with older versions.

FIxed a ew bugs in the upgrade scripts and ommisions in the admin application.
There have also been some cosmetic changes to increase the edit area for templates.

This is the first release including a major re-factoring of the code. The 1.0 Release will be maintaines as the current stable untill this release matures.
The data access methods have been completely abstracted to a set of DAOs to enable much easier extension of the framework to access different data sources.
As if to demonstrate the ease of adding access to new data sources I have implimented DAOs to access JMS Queues, JMS Topic and XML Files.
Inorder to facilitate this refactor changes have been made to the database which require the running of a migration script to any existing database. Most views will be preserved and continue to work OK. Menus have ceased to exist as separate entities now and are special cases of views so any pre-existing menus will not exist once you have migrated the database. Where possible upgrade paths from 1.0 to the latest 1.1 will be maintained.

Just a very minor release update to alter the behaviour of WARFARE. Requests for Unauthorised views now present a login dialog instead of being ignored.

Had to experiment with CVS branching and fix a bug in the 1.0 release.

The bug was in the menu generation.

Restriction clauses did not have retrieved values available to restrict
the select list on arbitary field values.

Should be OK now. You will have to add any fields needed for a
restriction clause to the views in which the menus are used. This is now
also documented in the UserGuide.

I have finalised the 1.0 release as I feel that it is stable enough and can do everything that it set out to do.
New Ideas are forming...........

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New in the 1.0b8 Release
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There has been a large scale tidy up of the class hierachy for the
various display routines. This was precipitated by the need to extend
the functionality to include the ability to target a view in a hvtml
page and have some more control. It was discovered that there was some
duplication and i am far to lazy to impliment a new feature in two
different places. (I know about copy and paste but just 'cos it's easy
to do does not mean I like doing it or having to maintain it in future
which is potentially far more effort than the re-factoring).... read more

The new release 1.0 beta 7 is now ready for download.
Some additional features in this release.

XML/XSLT output modes for input and results views
Exception Framework added to propogate errors through the tiers of the framework.

Additional Demo Application Added.

SCAM, System Configuration Application Matrix a simple application to store information about software and applications installed on machines.

More of a bug fix than the last release. The modules would not install in beta 5 if you were not connected to the internet as the xlst task to install modules tried to verify the webapp_2_3.dtd from java.sun.com. I have added a local copy of the dtd to the modules directory and updated the build.xml to reference it.

The new beta 5 release is now out.
This represents a major refacoring of the distribition.
There is enhanced modularity for the demo applications
and a vastly improved security model which is now container aware.

The second public beta is now out with some cosmetic improvements and a tidier build process.
It also keeps its logs in one place as well.

The First Public Beta has been released. Whoo!