ICEfaces 1.7 is here!
A lot of sweat and a few tears
went into it, and it took a little longer to arrive than many of us
would have liked, but I think you'll be very pleased with how it turned
out. The culmination of over 45 enhancements, 110
improvements, and 300 bug fixes, there's no question that it's
a major leap forward in the evolution of ICEfaces.
With significant enhancements and improvements in every direction you
look, there is truly something here for everyone.
Perhaps the most visible changes are the 7 entirely new components
(e.g. context menu, rich text editor, media player, Google
map, split-pane, etc.), with an additional 6 subcomponents for Google
Maps alone. Additionally, there have been a whopping 47
component enhancements made as well, including user-resizable table
columns, multi-column / multi-row table headers, row-span grouping of
table data, auto-positioning for popup panels - the list goes on and
on. An entirely new theme has been added too, called "Rime",
which provides a fresh new face for the ICEfaces Component
Suite. I'm pleased to report that in this release
we've been able to address most of the
highest-ranked new component features as voted for
by the ICEfaces community.
To better demonstrate all the new component features the Component
Showcase sample applications have been completely redeveloped. The new
Component Showcase features improved code-samples, more
consistent styling and layout, and improved component demos
for many components. It also provides additional links to component
documentation and resources, tutorials, etc., providing an excellent
starting point for anyone looking to learn more about the
components.
Less visible, but equally important to everyone leveraging ICEfaces'
asynchronous update features (Ajax-push) in wide-scale
deployments is the addition of out-of-the-box support for 5
leading Asynchronous Request Processing (ARP)
implementations, such as Glassfish "Grizzly" and Tomcat 6 / JBoss 4.2
NIO. By leveraging these ARP implementations ICEfaces
applications can immediately benefit from reduced server-side
resource consumption for asynchronous applications, resulting in
increased scalability of asynchronous apps. on the same hardware and
software. Special thanks to Jean-Francois Arcand at Sun for all his help with the Glassfish Grizzly integration.
In addition, we've re-engineered the JavaScript bridge to handle
asynchronous connection management between multiple viewports
using a robust connection sharing implementation
that eliminates issues related to using multiple async. views
between browsers and to the same host due to the HTTP
2-connection limit. The Asynchronous HTTP Server (AHS) has also been
added into the core ICEfaces bundle for this release, along with a new
servlet deployment mode that makes it easier to configure and use.
The changes above were a key enabler for ICEfaces much improved support
for JSR-168 portlets, including full support for multiple ICEfaces
portlets on a the same page, async. or synchronous, from a single .war
file or several. ICEfaces 1.7 has been verified with
5 leading Java portal containers, including Liferay Portal,
BEA WebLogic Portal, and JBoss Portal. Some really outstanding work has
been done to bring robust portlet support to the ICEfaces community.
I'd like to give a shout-out of thanks to our friends at
Liferay in particular, who have been fantastic supporters of ICEfaces
and continue to work with us to bring the best portlet development
experience possible to the combined ICEfaces and Liferay
communities.
New features are nice but without excellent documentation and examples
they can be difficult to use effectively. On this front we've put a
concerted effort in to review and upgrade the ICEfaces documentation in
this release, beyond simply refreshing references, etc. for
1.7. The net result is we've added of 8 entirely new sections
and 2 new appendices. We've really tried to fill in some gaps in
the and react to community suggestions for improvements. I'd
strongly recommend to everyone to check out the new docs, it
will save you time in the long run and allow to get the most out of
what ICEfaces has to offer.
There really is far too much that's new and improved in
1.7 for me to cover here, updates to Tool integrations, new Seam sample
applications, etc., etc.. Check out the
Release Notes for the complete
picture.
Finally, I'd need to highlight how greatly 1.7 has benefited from all
the community involvement along the way. A special thank-you to
everyone who's been working with the ICEfaces 1.7 early-access
releases and reporting issues, offering suggestions, and
making contributions. It's been a very challenging, yet satisfying
release, and that's best kind, really.
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