[Seaside] [ANN] Seaside 2.9 Alpha 2

[Lukas Renggli]

Over a month has passed since the last release of Seaside 2.9. We are
very pleased to announced Seaside 2.9 Alpha 2 as a next step towards
the release of Seaside 2.9.

We've mainly worked on two things: (1) closing critical issues that
have been collected in the bug tracker, and (2) making different
configurations of Seaside a snap to load.


1. Closed Issues
================

- Issue 3: A RESTful configuration editor would be very useful
- Issue 87: ColorValue>>hex fixes
- Issue 126: review request handler documentation
- Issue 165: consider WAPainter refactoring
- Issue 193: do we really need #vmStatisticsReportString?
- Issue 200: Seaside 2.9 project page on SqueakSource outdated
- Issue 206: check weird #value call on block in WADebugErrorHandler
- Issue 211: deprecate the scriptcaulous convenience methods on Canvas
- Issue 216: RSS Changes demo produces invalid XML
- Issue 218: WADispatcherEditor doing a #call: in #initialRequest:
- Issue 219: Why does WADecorationTask override #updateStates: ?
- Issue 227: #halt should always halt
- Issue 228: Move the Swazoo server adapter over to WAServerAdaptor
- Issue 234: Source code view is broken after painter refactoring
- Issue 240: JSJsonTests are not portable
- Issue 241: WANumberPrinter>>#digitsOf:base: uses a Float as an Array index
- Issue 242: Using a niladic actionBlock with on:do: in not portable
- Issue 245: WAHalo Source View is broken
- Issue 246: Anchor callbacks should not accept blocks with one argument
- Issue 249: WATree broken in example browser
- Issue 250: JQuery Droppable does not seem to work right
- Issue 251: Accepting code in the browser opens a deprecation warning in Pharo
- Issue 254: Sourceview via halo does not seem to work
- Issue 256: Setting the default entry point does not seem to work
- Issue 258: Bad XHTML for versionuploader
- Issue 259: Request modification to WAPlatformTest>>#testIsResumable

... and uncounted enhancements to the core code and various other
optional packages such as JQuery, JQuery-UI, Swazoo Server Adapters,
etc. We've further improved portability to other Smalltalk dialects,
in this round we mostly focused on VA Smalltalk.


2. The Seaside Builder
======================

We are proud to announce the Seaside Builder, the tool that makes it a
snap to load a specific set of Seaside 2.9 packages into any recent
Pharo or Squeak image:

	http://builder.seaside.st
	
The Seaside Builder lets you either select a predefined configuration
of Seaside packages or manually choose the packages you need. The
builder automatically ensures that all prerequisites are selected and
loaded in the right order. For the first time it is possible to
conveniently choose between the MIT licensed Comanche or the LGPL
licensed Swazoo web server.

At the bottom of the page there are two download options available:
"Load Script" creates a change-set that can be dragged onto any image
causing it to load the selected Seaside packages. There is also the
possibility to download a "Monticello Configuration" of the selected
packages. In the future more download options might become available.


3. Things to be aware of
========================

First of all, it is important to remember that this is an Alpha
release and therefore might not be suited to be used in production. We
are however rapidly approaching the beta phase and disruptive changes
are unlikely. Some of the core team members are already using Seaside
2.9 in production.

You'll find a list of current migration issues at
http://seaside.st/documentation/migration/28to29.


4. When things go wrong
=======================

If you run into problems or encounter problems, please let us know
using the issue tracker at
http://code.google.com/p/seaside/issues/list or through the mailing
list. We are especially interested into feedback concerning "The
Seaside Builder".

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch