Version 1.5.0

New features in Helma 1.5 include a flexible new way to load multiple code repositories, many low-level improvements and features such as updateable collections, additional web-based development tools that can run inside your applications and complement existing external debugging and database management tools, and a library of Javascript prototypes and methods that extend the Java based core of Helma.

• Reimplmenent .hac and .hsp support
• Implement global serialize() and deserialize() functions and add corresponding methods to ScriptingEngine
• Implement Session.login(username, password)
• Extract session handling into SessionManager class
• Refactoring and improvements for embedded XmlDatabase
• Add logging functions that take an exception object as second argument, use error logging functions for internal errors
• Many fixes in repository and resource handling
• Allow Helma to run without listening to any server ports
• Fix resource ordering for multiple type.properties files
• Make session cookie IP binding optional (appname.protectedSessionCookie property in apps.properties)
• Renamed former rootPrototype property to hrefRootProperty, since it defines the root object only as far as href() function is concerned
• Add rootPrototype and userPrototype properties that allow to set the prototypes for the root and user objects, respectively
• Implement Application.getRootPrototype() and Application.getRootId() that allow to get the prototype and id of the app's root node
• Make sure Helma alsways uses absolute path names internally
• Make Helma logging and log file rotation code scale better
• Implement ignore-dirs functionality (appname.ignore = dir1,dir2)
• Implement MultiFileRepository: all subdirectories are treated as top level file repositories (instaed of treating them as prototype dirs)
• Implement updateable collections
• Many concurrency and liveness fixes
• Fix Rhino per-thread-scope support
• Set JDBC connections to readonly mode depending on the operation we're about to perform
• Fixes to scheduler
• Switch to Jakarta Commons FileUpload for file upload handling
• Introduce uploadSoftfail setting in apps.properties that allows file upload errors to be cought by checking req.data.helma_upload_error
• Add app.getCronJobs() function that allows to retrieve the currently registered custom cron jobs. This returns a JavaScript object with the function name as property names and the helma.util.CronJob instance as property values.
• Make Helma run with GCJ
• Various changes, fixes and enhancements to the imaging code:
  • Added Image.trim(), that trims an image based on a specified pixel, just like in Photoshop
  • saveAs exists in two versions now, one that takes a filename, the other an OutputStream + Mime type
  • Added more possible parameters for the Image() constructor: BufferedImage, Image
  • Replaced Quantize by ColorQuantizer, which was freshly ported from the latest ImageMagick sources and updated with the Alpha Channel support that I added earlier to Qantize. This fixes a nasty bug when quantizing images with few colors (e.g. 32 -> 16 which often resultd in only 4 colors) and increases the general quality of color reduction a lot
  • Make ImageIOGenerator the default ImageGenerator, JimiGenerator the fallback scenario
• Only interpret last path element as action if it is not terminated by a "/". This helps us to disambiguify URLs: /foo/ will never be interpreted as action, while /foo will be.
• Try to autodetect Joins in additionalTables option
• Make helmadoc work with multiple application repositories
• Pass prefix, suffix, default parameters to macro functions and allow them to change them. Implemented by putting these values into a helper class RenderParameters which can easily overridden.
• Do not log concurrency conflicts. This is often misinterpreted as error which it is not
• Add dontEnum() function to JavaScript Object prototype. Takes a variable list of String arguments of propertiy names to set to DONTENUM
• Allow days value of zero in order for cookies to be deleted
• Implement unsetCookie(name) that causes a prevously set cookie to be discarded
• Consider superclasses and interfaces when resolving class to prototype mapping
• Fix prototype inheritance for wrapped Java objects. get() and has() are not supposed to check the prototype chain. Instead, just register the prototype using setPrototype()
• Allow passing a java.util.Locale to Date.format() as second argument
• Do not append break tag in res.writeln(), only append a newline character sequence
• Implement zero argument writeln() method to write a newline sequence.
• Fix exception handling:
  • Always print source file name and line number
  • Only print stack trace once
  • Always print stack trace
  • Always print stack trace for original exception
  • Also log full error stack trace for exceptions caught in macros
• Implement HopObject.__proto__ and JavaObject.__proto__ containing prototype object
• Fix constructor property in HopObject protos to be set to the actual constructor
• Implement JavaObject.__javaObject__ to contain the original java object in an unscripted wrapper
• Make sure JS functions in script-extended java objects actually override java methods
• Use unscripted wrapper rather than HopObject prototype if the prototype for java class is not defined
• Added helmaTools package
• Added helmaLib component
• Implement new welcome application
• Upgrade to Apache XML-RPC 2.0
• Implement new XML-RPC endpoint that is more consistent with Helma actions
• Updated default configuration files to include more current example properties and references to the relevant documentation
• Implement app.getDbProperties() for db.properties introspection
• Implement app.getDbSource(name)
• Implement app.getPrototypes() and app.getPrototype(name) to allow app introspection
• Implement HopObject.getResource(String filename), returns a helma.framework.repository.Resource object defined for the prototype
• Implement app.getRepositories() and app.addRepository(String|Repository)
• Add global variable "global" as a reference to the global object
• Introduce app.getLogger() and app.getLogger(name) that return a Jakarta commons Log instance. The zero argument method uses "helma.[appname].app" as category name
• Set node reference to an empty transient node in checkNode() for deleted/invalid HopObjects
• Make HopObject.get() behaviour more consistent and predictable: Return null for non-existing properties that were previously set or are defined in the type mapping, and undefined for non-existing properties that are not defined in the type mapping.
• Make ResponseTrans extend java.io.Writer in order to simplify using it with 3rd party templating engines.
• Rename hop.sh/hop.bat to start.sh/start.bat
• Change appDir handling:
  • If appDir is not defined in apps.properties, use the last file repository as appdir (used to be the first one)
  • If appDir is defined, add it to the end of the repository list if it isn't explicitly listed as repository.
  • If appDir is defined in apps.properties, use it for the app.dir JS variable.
  • Never automatically create an app's file repositories.
• Make JS Date to java.util.Date conversion flawless
• Add String getContent(String encoding) method to Resource interface
• Implement HopObject.getResources() - returns a JS array containing all resources with the given name defined in the prototype chain.
• Use res.skinpath to find hrefSkin when post-processing hrefs
• Implement invocation of global onStop() when the application is stopped, analogous to onStart() when the app is started.
• Implement invokation of onInit() for object instanced from db
• Implement global functions wrapJavaMap() and unwrapJavaMap() to masquerade instances of java.util.Map as JS objects and back.
• Add app.getClassLoader() getter for the app classloader
• Fix Rhino bug 309957 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309957>
• Introduce createTable() method in CacheMap to make internal table implementation overrideable for subclasses. Implement new WeakCacheMap class that uses java.util.WeakHashMap internally. Use it to fix a memory hog in the RhinoCore java wrapper cache.
• Implement SingleFileRepository which can be used to add a single global JS or jar file to an application
• Exit Helma if something important such as binding to a server port fails, rather than just logging the error
• Fix Helma build script to always recompile all files on build. Bake build date into version string displayed at startup.
• Add test if SQL connections are alive before reusing it for a new request
• Implement Prototype.getRepositories() method that returns an array containing the prototype's repositories
• Make usage of deprecated Thread.stop() dependent on setting of requestTimeoutStop = true|false app property
• Implement ETag based conditional GET based for files served via sendForward()
• Consider conditional GET headers in RequestTrans.equals(). This fixes a bug where Mozilla/Firefox displayed an empty page when fetching the same page with different headers within a short timeframe.
• Fix Last-Modified handler heading which was broken in more than one way.
• Don't generate ETag headers for error pages.
• Set response status to 500 (internal server error) for errors reported via ResponseTrans.reportError().
• Fix bug in persistent sessions involving JS objects

Page last modified on 2006-06-07 00:09 by hns