Just a week after releasing the 0.9.10 release, we have a new gem for you called 0.9.11 or “This one goes to 11″. This release includes a number of important bug fixes that have kept some of you from using SproutCore as well a few useful new features for integrating with a backend. The bug fixes include:
- Windows Support. 0.9.10 supported building SC apps for production on Windows machines but you couldn’t use it in dev mode. Images and other static resources would be missing because the sc-server tool depended on a Unix-only symlink. This is now fixed in 0.9.11 so no symlink is required. 0.9.11 should allow you to work completely in Windows now. Please let us know if you run into more trouble.
- Spaces in Volume Names. If your install path (including the Volume Name) included spaces, this would break the build tools, especially the documentation engine. Paths are now properly escaped so you can put the spaces back in your paths.
Those are the fixes, now for the features.
Introducing Proxy, by SproutCore
One of the most challenging parts of working with SproutCore in the past has been interacting with your backend server. SproutCore apps are loaded using sc-server in dev mode an then communicate with your backend server using Ajax. This architecture is one of the best things about SproutCore because you can use it with any backend technology. However because of the same origin policy of web browsers, testing has always been a bit difficult because you had to setup a reverse proxy on your dev machine to proxy both SproutCore and backend traffic to the same domain. If that sounds complicated, it is.
Now with 0.9.11 you can avoid all this because reverse proxy support is handled directly by sc-server. Just add one line to your sc-config and you’re good to go. Let’s say for example, you were working on a SproutCore application with a Rails backend. You load your SproutCore app by visiting http://localhost:4020/myapp, but your Rails server is running on port 3000. How does your application talk to the Rails server?
Simple, just add the following line to your sc-config.rb file and restart sc-server:
proxy '/rails', :to => 'localhost:3000'
Now any request your SproutCore app makes via XHR to /rails will be proxied by sc-server to your Rails app so you can talk to the backend.
This new feature is important because it makes the process of hooking your dev servers together into a format that resembles your production environment a one step process instead of dozens of steps involving apache like it did before.
To put a cap on this new feature, we’ve added the beginnings of a new demo app to the samples project. It’s a twitter client that right now will fetch the public feed of any user. How does the client talk to twitter? Well, if you look at the sc-config.rb file for the samples, you will see this line:
proxy '/', :to => 'twitter.com'
Done.
The forthcoming tutorials we are writing for tying a SproutCore app to a backend will explain how to use this feature in more detail but until then, for an example of tying your app to a backend, please see the Twitter client under development.
Other Features/Fixes
There are some other great feature improvements in 0.9.11 including:
- sc-server is now much faster thanks to some config changes to Merb.
- The sc-server is now much more sane about how it handles sc-config. You can now simply drop the latest sproutcore or prototype into your frameworks directory without having to edit the sc-config file and sc-server will pick up the latest version after you restart it.
- Improved documentation for various classes.
- Improved CSS appearance in FireFox 3 thanks to mde
- Removed debugger statements that could cause problems on some platforms thanks to August.
Below is the full set of release notes for this new release, but it is recommended that everyone upgrade. To upgrade your sproutcore just do:
sudo gem update sproutcore
In your shell.
Thanks to everyone who contributed tickets and patches for this release. You make a growing community of developers’ lives a little easier.
SproutCore 0.9.11 Release Notes
Framework
- [FIX] innerFrame tests were failing. Now working.
- Progress bar now shows 100% fill when set to indeterminate. This should make it easier to style an indeterminate appearance.
- Changed all references for window.location= to window.location.href=. Improves IE compatibility.
- Cleaned JSLint warnings from animator.js
- Removed stray debugger statements (thanks august!)
- Fixed CSS issues with SC-theme that made buttons appear offset. Now appears correctly in FF3 & Safari (thanks mde!)
- Added detect-browser script which can be included at the top of your page to detect the current browser and platform. Also includes an SC.setupBodyClassNames method that you can call after the body tag has been declared that will add class names for the current browser and platform.
- Added documentation for Function.property(), SC.Error, and SC.SegmentedView
Build Tools
- Build tools are now much smarter about how the they process configs. Before if you imported a framework (such as sproutcore) into your project you would need to import any dependent frameworks as well AND create configs for all of them. Now you do not need to do that. The build tools will load the most recent base environment (defined in config :all), along with the most recent bundle-specific config (defined in config :bundle_name) and the bundle-location details from whatever library holds the bundle. This will avoid a whole class of head-scratching config probs that people encountered when trying to setup their system.
- Removed unused controllers array from core.js template in client generator
- sc-server now supports the new proxy option in sc-config. You can use this to proxy your backend services through to your front-end SproutCore clients without having to setup a separate service.
- Changed some launch options for sc-server that will improve performance.
- JSDoc can now handle paths spaces in them.
- Build tools no longer rely on symlink in dev mode. This should improve compatibility with Windows systems.
Tags: Announcements by charles
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