[Seaside] [ANN] New seaBreeze 4.5 (on Seaside 3.0)

[Magnus Schwarz]

Hi Everybody,

we just prepared a new version of seaBreeze for you, its version is 4.5 now,
and we put in some effort to enhance the user experience and ease of use.
First of all, we changed the foundation, that is, seaBreeze is now running
on VisualWorks 7.7 and Seaside 3.0alpha5, which is the latest Seaside
version for VisualWorks right now.
Seaside 3.0 refactored and re-architected many areas, so numerous fixes and
adaptations had to be done because of that, we don't go into details.
But we want to point you to the main areas of innovation in seaBreeze
version 4.5.

Seaside 3.0 introduced support for 'jQuery', another JavaScript library,
which enabled the use of 'jsTree', a plug-In to jQuery to display tree
views.
Using jsTree, we renovated the seaBreeze tree element, which leads to a new
look&feel in the element tree of the seaBreeze editor.
Re-arranging elements in the element tree is now _much_ easier, and support
for multi-selection is integrated into the tree widget using the platform
multi-select keyboard support.

seaBreeze now supports ValueModels for almost all aspects.
This way, for instance, an aspect of an InputField can be a ValueHolder,
which updates the InputField on the web page when its value was changed
using the #value: method. 
Application code changing the value of a ValueModel will now immediately
update the web page without further programming.
This concept is known to all VisualWorks programmers for a long time,
ValueModels are the base of the GUI framework of VisualWorks for almost 20
years.
Along with improvements of the Ajax support, the display handling of
seaBreeze web pages using Ajax is now much less flickery than before.

FileLibraries in seaBreeze now support arbitrary file names, the 'real'
names are stored in a pragma of the method storing the file content; the
method name is no longer used to identify the stored file. This was
introduced to eliminate possible name conflicts caused by the automatic
filename to selector conversion used in previous versions.

Furthermore FileLibraries in zip format are supported in seaBreeze, which is
very convenient for embedding of some external libraries (such as tinyMCE).

The rich text editor of seaBreeze, which is the tinyMCE editor, is better
integrated than ever.
You are now able to configure the editor used on your web page with respect
to the editor tools you want to provide to your user, like the table-tool,
or the bold-italic-underline buttons.

The seaBreeze tab- and menu-elements are easier to configure.
Some of the layout parameters are configurable in the respective element
editors, so extensive editing of CSS attributes is no longer needed for
those widgets to get a decent style.

We improved support for web application dialog handling by introducing class
SBAjaxDialog.
Look at the list of class methods there, almost all dialogs you know as a
VisualWorks programmer from the GUI framework class Core.Dialog are
available now.
All dialogs opened using class SBAjaxDialog will be shown in a lightbox
above your running web application.

Handling of CSS files has been changed when seaBreeze detects errors.  
The files will be sent to the browser unchanged now to enable the use of
expressions which are not valid css but nonetheless could be interpreted by
(some) browsers (such as activeX filters for the IE)

Last but not least, we are happy to announce that the latest Opera browser
is one of the browsers to provide 'seaBreeze editor support', as do Firefox,
Chrome and Safari.
As with previous seaBreeze versions, application written in seaBreeze are
compatible with other browsers as well, only the editing support my be
limited.


You can download this version (as always) from the Cincom public store
repository
(http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/CincomSmalltalkWiki/PostgreSQL+Access+Page).

Have fun using it!

The team of seaBreeze at heeg.de

-- 
Magnus Schwarz * certified Scrum Master / Smalltalk architect * mailto:magnus.schwarz at heeg.de
phone:+49 231 97599-0 * fax:+49 231 97599-20
Georg Heeg eK Dortmund
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Dortmund  A 12812
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