Xaraya .9.0.4 Released

It is my pleasure to announce the release of the .9.0.4 Beta for Xaraya. This release is another milestone to the 1.0 release as final development touches are being placed on the code base. .9.0.4 outwardly has very few feature enhancements (there are new features within the modules package), however internally this release has very significant changes.

The first of these changes deal with the changing of the memory usage of Xaraya. Memory usage has been cut by 20 - 40 % in many areas. This leads to fewer loads on the server that is running Xaraya and increased server capabilities. The change was spear-headed by mikespub and has shown a dramatic improvement. Each module has been split function by function, however this is purely optional on the part of module developers.

There is also the proliferation of variable handling which is being led by Flavio Botelho and is based upon code written by Marco Canini. We are changing the variable handling to a more robust manner than xarVarCleanFromInput(). The new method allows validation at the time of the variable being introduced, rather than extra processing to handle the input variables. Once again, this is a very transparent change on the system, but goes quite a ways towards a more secure and flexible manner of handling inputs into your Xaraya system. For each of these changes, the Example module has a step by step breakdown on the impact and the form.

In addition, Marc Lutolf has been hard at work shoring up the Roles and Privileges for Xaraya. These changes are also transparent for the most part, but they go a very long way to stabilizing the Xaraya user and permissions systems.

In the previous three weeks since the .9.0.3 release, we have been hard at work on the bugs that many of you reported. 279 changesets have been accomplished of the over 3000 since the beginning of Xaraya. We will continue to produce results at a very fast pace, because each of us understand the milestone that we are close to accomplishing.

Work is progressing towards 1.0.0, and we are getting to a very stable point to begin to work on performance and overall consistency throughout the system. I would like to thank each and every person that has submitted bug reports and ask that you continue to share your ideas and observations. We need the continued support from everyone to ensure that Xaraya is best that it can be. I would like to thank everyone that has helped us get to this point. Stay tuned, it only gets more fun from here on out.

Download provided at SourceForge.net -- http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=64578

J. Cox for Team Xaraya