Web Panels for PHP5 / News: Recent posts

The end, or a new beginning. I've decided to stop developing WebPanels (not that I had been doing much in the last 5 months or so) due to work commitments, and the emergence of PRADO (http://www.xisc.com/). Instead of developing a framework that operates in a very similar manner, and considering that I'd have to rewrite large portions of WebPanels to be happy with it now, I'm going to instead give what development time I have to help out that project. Thanks to everyone who has helped out with WebPanels, if only for ideas and suggestions. I think you'll find PRADO to be every bit as good as people say it is, and it's going to get better. ... read more

This is the first release of Entity, the database object mapping framework that I've been using to run this page. You can download it either through sourceforge, or directly from the site http://tanus.dotgeek.org/?entity=297&entityAction=viewEntity . Part of the Entity framework is a forum type which I've used for a new forum http://tanus.dotgeek.org/?entity=293&entityAction=viewEntity . Please note that you will have to register to post.

In my quest for a decent Wiki to use for documentation, I instead decided to create my own. It's built on top of a new framework I'm building called Entity, which is a mapping of objects to the database. This abstraction removes most of the tediousness of working with database queries.

XML definition file for an entity classtype.
http://tanus.dotgeek.org/images/xml.png

A list of installed classtypes
http://tanus.dotgeek.org/images/classtypes.png... read more

Along with this release comes a Wiki for getting some further documentation going. You can find it at http://webpanels.sourceforge.net/wiki . There's not a great deal of detail there yet, but I'll be adding to it whenever I get the urge (and it is open for you to add information to also).

The following changes have been made for this release;

- Fixed the PATH_SEPARATOR variable. Don't know how I missed it for so long, but thats what happens when you don't have internet for months on end and have no access to a linux box.
- Changed FileUpload to set the text property so validation can work.
- Fixed Module->ModulePage() to set the page that's about to be viewed using a Page object instaed of a string
- Changed modules to only load a default page if a page isn't already set externally.
- Added in the WpDirectory class that provides an API for manipulating directories.
- Fixed Control to always set a value out of post regardless of whether it should be alidated later or not.
- Changed RequiredFieldValidator to check the PostValue instead of whether it was text so that things like lists can be validated.
- Added in a Reverse method for Collections
- Changed Panel to be able to have Text() printed on them.
- Added UniBase, a db abstraction class that will return the appropriate db classes determined by the DSN passed in Connection.

I'm writing an object centric database mapping type application (I'm sure there's a proper name, but for now that'll do) at the moment, and decided that I might as well make some sort of a database abstraction layer. WebPanels' db classes make it easy to do that with a simple static factory that for now I'm calling UniBase;

/**
* UniBase
*
* Factory class for creating the correct database classes
*
* @access
* @package
* @author Marcus Nyeholt
* @version $Id: UniBase.php,v 1.1 2004/09/08 09:43:12 tanus Exp $
*/
class UniBase
{
/**
* The Data Source Name to connect to.
* @var string
* @access
*/
protected static $dsn;... read more

Seems there I managed to crash linux Apache with some code I was trying, which meant the site went. As I haven't had internet until this week I haven't been able to get on and fix it, but everything seems to be running normally again. Now that I have access, I should be able to answer questions a lot quicker, and hopefully get documentation going again (I'm thinking of a wiki... good idea?).

Anyway, I've redone the generated API documentation which is currently being uploaded, along with a zipped version of it. I'm thinking of modifying it slightly so that user comments can be added ala the PHP site, I'll see how motivated I get. There's also a new release coming in the next couple of days that is mostly bug fixing. Now that I've got net access again I'll also be releasing regular patches as opposed to full releases, and getting the CVS tree running again. ... read more

I haven't tested WebPanels on Linux all that much, and have managed to miss a critical bug in webpanels.config.php. On about line 72, there's a statement

$cur .= ";".$dir;

This should be replaced with

$cur .= PATH_SEPARATOR.$dir;

This should fix a lot of problems people have been having with linux.

This release is mostly a bug fix release;

- Added in PgSQL database classes
- Added the start of the testing framework integration.
- Fixed bugs with iterating over datasources.
- Changed Parameter value setting to stop returning garbage from empty strings
(a call to dbtype_escape_string returns garbage string if called with an
empty string as a parameter).
- Added $extra parameter to ChangeModule so that other data can be passed to a
refresh
- Changed the way access exceptions are thrown; now they're only thrown by
Page or Module controls. Other controls just don't print anything.
- Added HasAccess to control that lets you quickly check if a user has access to
a control.
- Added in a basic forum example in the download, and linked to a basic forum
example as a separate download.... read more

WebPanels 2.1.0 is now released. This version brings with it a great deal of speed improvements, along with some more intuitive API fixes. There are also a few control changes that makes editing a lot more flexible (see the Evaluator and Repeater controls), mainly through code accessibility from templates. You'll also notice that the site has been moved to dotgeek hosting until sourceforge gets around to upgrading to PHP5.... read more

Release 2.1.0 is almost ready to go. There are a LOT of new changes to this release, with the a couple of new things that greatly speed up processing;

Compiled Templates
There is now an option for WebPanels to compile templates into native PHP code. This means that instead of parsing a template file each request, the compiled template (which is a mess of PHP interspersed with HTML) is used to initialise then render the control. This is a big speed boost, especially with larger template files.... read more

WebPanels 2.0.2 has been released. This version comes with several bug fixes, and 2 new controls. One of these, the Evaluator, lets you use inline PHP code in your templates that allows more flexibility. Also, the people over at http://www.dotgeek.org are offering free PHP5 hosting which I have used to set up an examples page, available at http://tanus.dotgeek.org/index.php .

WebPanels 2.0, completely rewritten in PHP5 and based on the ASP.NET code-behind approach, has been released. This new release allows for pages to be designed using Visual Studio or the free ASP.NET WebMatrix editor, and be compatible with the framework. See http://webpanels.sourceforge.net/?page=getstarted for an example of how easy it is to get started using the framework, and download it from https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=90003&package_id=116729&release_id=234669