XBL in JS / News: Recent posts

XBLinJS 0.3 is released; see changelog on the files page, and check out the XBLinJS blog entries at http://www.jerf.org/iri/categories/XBLinJS/index.html .

The admonition to use the CVS, while weakened, is still in effect; it's still changing rapidly as I explore the modern DOMs and continue to try to flatten the differences between the browsers. Still some stupid [expletive] stuff in the intricacies of the browser interfaces, but I remain hopeful that I can remove much of the pain.

Very significant improvements have been made to the CVS version and I strongly recommend starting with the CVS version. I'm holding off on a "0.3" release until I have the opportunity to test it better in Internet Explorer. I will do this in conjunction with some other projects I have, but they were unexpectedly delayed, so it'll be a bit.

It's been a while since there were any interface changes in the CVS, only feature additions, so I'm fairly confident that stuff written now will continue to work with the .3 release. (If it doesn't, the library should tell you what is wrong.) Updated documentation can be read in the docSrc/xblinjs directory.

XBLinJS 0.2 is released!

This releases features several sample widgets that are themselves legitimately useful, and a lot more documentation.

As of this release, I still have not tested these things on anything but Mozilla. Please let me know if there's a problem on other browsers (that might feasibly work).

My plans for the next release are to include JSUnit-based testing that will make cross-browser testing easy and controllable, which is why it hasn't been a big deal for me, and I'm not sure it should be for you, either.

XBLinJS as it is currently posted goes a long way toward fulfilling the goals of the project, but is thin on examples or realizations of the promise of useful widgets.

The next releases will focus on providing some sample widgets, documentation, and public examples of those sameple widgets. .2 will have a simple "label" widget, a controllable dropdown widget like what Google Suggest uses (although a superior implementation in almost every way for most developers), better docs, and a "debugging" page I've designed for my own use that helps debug Javascript (not just widgets).... read more