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Echo3 Status Update: March 2008

Mon, 03/10/2008 - 14:07 — tliebeck

Hello all,

The big news in the past couple months of Echo3 development has been the maturing of the client-side version of the framework. This was accomplished largely by creating the Client-Side JavaScript Demo App, which currently stands just shy of about 5,000 lines of JavaScript code (note that line counts tend to be significantly lower for JS apps compared to server apps). The development of this application served three purposes: The first was nothing more than to show off what the framework can do and serve as a marketing tool. The second was to provide a proper example application. The third and arguably most important was to test and refine the client-side framework by writing a reasonably complex application with it.

The result of putting the client-side to the test has been a great number of refinements and simplifications to the client-side framework. The server-side framework has benefited as well as the changes also served to improve rendering performance. Significant changes include:

  • Client-side property objects have been eliminated.
  • Refinements and performance enhancements to components for client-side application use.
  • Refinements to client-side API, including shortening method names for commonly invoked methods, e.g., getRenderProperty() has become render().
  • A good number of bugs found and fixed.

Status of Issues for 3.0 Release

The following are some of the more pressing issues in Echo3 (and Extras) that need to be in place before 3.0 releases (bear in mind that Echo3 3.0 may be released while Echo3Extras 3.0/EchoStudio 3.0 are still beta) There are less significant feature enhancements present in the bug tracker @ http://bugs.nextapp.com/mantis/view_all_bug_page.php (select project Echo3).

General Framework Issues

  • Review/finalize client rendering API. Issue: 68
  • Finalize synchronization locking mechanism. Issue: 67

Components

  • Client-side table needs to be developed. Issue: 136
  • Extras CalendarSelect needs rewriting. Issue: 153

Localization

  • Client-side resource bundles need work. Issue: 159
  • Support Right-to-Left rendering. Issue: 160

Accessibility

  • Basic components can be controlled via keyboard, but various extras components need work. Issues: 1 149 150 151 152.

Documentation

  • Complete "Component Authoring" section of the Developer's Guide.
  • Provide standard for documenting style properties within client side component JSDoc documentation. This will likely take the form of an "@sproperty {type} name description" tag. Issue: 161
  • Provide JSDoc documentation tool to generate XML/HTML documentation from JSDoc tags. This tool will take into account "@sproperty" tags and properly parse classes created with Core.extend(). 162

Additional Notes

Releases: A release of Echo3 and Echo3Extras will be out this week.

Documentation: I'm very interested in getting feedback on the Developer's Guide. I would greatly appreciate any input on this documentation. If you're confused by any of it, chances are others will be as well.

Bugtracking: Please report any issues to the bugtracker at http://bugs.nextapp.com. It only takes a moment to create an account.

Best
--Tod