Stubblog - Announcements

Stubbles 1.1.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:03:15 +0100

This weekend we shipped the fresh Stubbles 1.1.0 release to our downloads page, bringing one or the other great new feature to our users. This includes but is not limited to full support for dependency injection on interceptors, delayed logging, support for providing REST services, and several more improvements which allow simpler usage of Stubbles by supporting dependency injection on even more places throughout the framework.

Such improvements can be seen on the example of how the usage of databases had to be enabled in Stubbles 1.0.0 and how it could be done with 1.1.0: With 1.0.0 you had to configure the database connections in a config file, and you had to add the stubDatabaseBindingModule to the list of binding modules which configure the binder. Now in Stubbles 1.1.0 the last step is not necessary any more, you only require a config file (which, btw, changed from XML to ini format), and after the config file is there you can start in your application classes to get database connection or entity manager instances injected. This works because we added annotations to the framework classes, so that the framework provides a usable default binding without the need to explicit specify these defaults by the user. However, if the default bindings do not satisfy a user's needs he still can configure his own database bindings using his own binding module. Convention over configuration, sort of.

Get the release from our downloads page, for a full list of changes see the changelog.

vfsStream 0.6.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:46:33 +0100

Seldom in a life of a developer it comes to the point where a bug can be fixed by a feature addition. This February, it happend to vfsStream. A user reported a bug where overwriting an existing vfsStream file with new but smaller content replaced only portions of the file, leaving the rest in place instead of truncating the old content before writing the fresh content. After some investigation it turned out the best fix for the problem was to implement the long scheduled feature issue 7. Thought, said, done. So today I shipped vfsStream 0.6.0 including complete support for for $mode param when opening files.

While I was at it, I added support for the $options param as well, it now evaluates whether STREAM_REPORT_ERRORS is set and acts accordingly when opening a file.

Unfortunately there are bad news as well. Due to another issue I found out that ext/zip does not work with vfsStream, and that there is no way to add support for it in vfsStream. Maybe if someone with slightly more C skills than me (which are equal to zero) might want to look into this problem for a better explanation, as I can only assume that it's due to ext/zip not supporting userland stream wrappers.

If you like the new additions get the new release.

vfsStream 0.5.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:17:37 +0100

Today I shipped vfsStream 0.5.0 which brings a new feature thanks to the efforts of Benoit Aubuchon: vfsStream now supports the rename() functionality which allows you to write test cases using vfsStream for methods that rename files. Another patch of him was to change the stat() call to respect the STREAM_URL_STAT_QUIET flag.

One more new feature is the added support for . as current directory alias so that vfs://foo/. resolves to vfs://foo - this allows to use file_exists($dir . '/.') as workaround for the failing is_executable() call on directories, as described in the comments to the is_executable() documentation in the PHP manual. Of course this raises the question if vfsStream will support .. as well - if somebody takes the time to create a patch I will incorporate this. I did not look into this issue further, but I guess it might involve recursion and a more advanced parsing of the vfs URL to make it work properly, as there might be cases like vfs://foo/bar/baz/../../dummy.

So grab the release and make use of the new features, if you like to.

Stubbles 1.0.2 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:41:12 +0100

Some minutes ago we released Stubbles 1.0.2. This is a bugfix release, containing the following fixes:

added support in ingrid for selected attribute

fixed bugs in ingrid with field and id names

deferred loading of request value error message data until first creation of such a request value error message

fixed defect #233: stubMailValidator doesn't support uppercase letters

You can get the release from our downloads page.

Stubbles 1.0.1 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:43:29 +0100

Some minutes ago we released Stubbles 1.0.1. This is a bugfix release, containing the following fixes:

fixed security issue: route name not checked correctly

prevented loading of already loaded XJConf classes and interfaces

optimized annotation cache: write cache file only if annotation data changes

fixed ticket #226: @ProvidedBy does not support .class notation

We encourage all users to upgrade due to a security issue with 1.0.0 with route names where the validation of the selected route name was not done properly. You can get the release from our downloads page.

Stubbles 1.0.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:28:19 +0200

This weekend we released Stubbles 1.0.0 as the first non-alpha/non-beta version, recommended for production usage. We decided to drop all view engines except the XML/XSL one as we recommend only using this. The Memphis view engine using patTemplate was just a heavy steel ball on our feets, and our decision to drop it manifested in the way that we were able to improve Dependency Injection support all over the way for the XML/XSL view engine.

Further improvements compared to the last release focused on the command line support. Now you can write your script as implementation of the net::stubbles::console::stubConsoleCommand, using Dependency Injection in all places, and run the command with our new stubcli script which is capable of running all net::stubbles::console::stubConsoleCommand implementations.

The filter API saw a major rework making it simpler then ever to apply filters to input values. We will improve the validator API in the same way with the 1.1.0 release.

Of course several bug fixes found their way into the release. See changelog for a complete list of changes. You can get the release from our download pages.

Unfortunately the documention is not complete. If you have questions just open tickets, we will address documentation issues then.

What's next? We have planned bugfix releases for 1.0.0 if necessary. Additionally we already planned the 1.1.0 release. See list of tickets for milestone 1.1.0 on what we have planned.

vfsStream 0.4.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:19:59 +0200

Some minutes ago I released vfsStream 0.4.0, introducing support for file modes, owners and groups. While I planned to implement this at least since a year it took me three tries to get it implemented, and while implementing this I stumbled about some issues which can not be solved by vfsStream. Major problem is that the PHP functions chmod(), chown() and chgrp() do not work with vfsStream URLs due to limitations imposed by PHP (or possibly by underlying C, not sure). The stream wrapper API has no support to enable setting file modes, owner or group of a userland stream implementation. This means the usage of file mode support is limited and can not be applied to create tests for classes using one of the three functions. However, it is still possible to use file modes for testing correct usage of is_readable(), is_writable() and is_executable(). Another usage scenario is to make sure directories created with mkdir() receive the correct file mode, see the file mode example. I'm sure users will come up with other usage scenarios I did not even thought of.

Beside this new feature the release contains a bugfix for vfsStreamDirectory::addChild() to make sure adding another child of the same name as an existing child replaces this existing child, and a fix to return correct results for stat() calls. Grab the release via it's pear channel pear.php-tools.net and try it out. I suspect the file mode support may contain bugs because I did not have the time to use it in other projects, but after all, it is still in alpha stage.

Stubbles 0.16.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:56:57 +0200

Last night we released Stubbles 0.16.0 which is mainly a bugfix release but still contains some new stuff. Most remarkable of the new stuff is the native support of Iterator instances to behave as arrays when serialized with the XMLSerializer. Another interesting feature is the possibility to configure the xml generators to be used by the XMLProcessor of the XML/XSL view engine, which allows you to add your own xml generator and have arbitrary data available on the dom tree of every page.

For the command line folks we added the possibility of asynchronous command line execution with the Executor. This way one can issue several commands at once and wait until they are processed while doing other things in the meantime.

Bug fixes focused on the input grid support, making it more usable for everyday usage of forms. For a full list of changes see the changelog.

On another note, this is the last minor release which contains the Memphis and Rasmus view engines. We will discontinue them in trunk and the next minor release will not contain them. However, we will do bugfix releases for the 0.16.x series if necessary and keep the support for 0.16.x until our own applications are migrated to the XML/XSL view engine later this year, meaning that support will be available at least until December 31st 2009.

Stubbles 0.15.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:56:30 +0200

New month, a new release: 0.15.0. On the last release 0.14.0 I said the next release will most likely be 1.0.0. Turned out, it is not. We don't have a new release date for 1.0.0 yet, as this highly depends on our demand to have its XML/XSL view engine proven in reality, which we do not have a new date for yet.

Beside this, the release brings some new stuff: One could have more then one master.xsl in the XML/XSL view engine now, which means the stylesheet for generating the stylesheet is now highly extensible by custom templates. We improved the net::stubbles::service::soap package by fixing inconsistencies and made it usable in conjunction with our Inversion of Control feature. Speaking about Inversion of Control, we added the @ProvidedBy annotation which can be added to interfaces and classes to declare the default injection provider for those types. This is similar to the @ImplementedBy annotation, but offers more possibilities on what has to be done to construct the requested object.

For a complete list of changes consult our changelog.

Stubbles 0.14.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:20:36 +0100

Some minutes ago we released Stubbles 0.14.0. Most likely this is the last release before 1.0.0, which is schedules for end of March or early April, depending on how many bugs we will find until then. But back to the current release, what's new?

One highlight of this release is the introduction of support for JSON-RPC communication with qooxdoo applications. We improved the already existing JSON-RPC support to cope with some qooxdoo specialities, so it should now be possible to create RIA qooxdoo frontends with Stubbles as backend on the server. Compared to the YUI support we currently do not provide the possibility to create JavaScript stubs for the browser side, as this might not be worth the effort due to the ease of requesting data from the server with qooxdoo. At least that's what the programmer said - we will see if it stays that way, it's subject to discussion.

Most of the other changes are improvements of the Inversion of Control feature rework we did with 0.13.0, one is that there is no need any more to explicitly bind the mode, as this is an optional dependency now. Additionally, the net::stubbles::lang::stubMode class is now an interface, allowing users to have their own mode implementations. The implementation delivered with Stubbles can now be found in net::stubbles::lang::stubDefaultMode. Additionally it is now possible to create an application without binding the logger, all dependencies to it were changed to be optional.

As always, for a complete list of changes see the changelog.

vfsStream 0.3.2 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 22:20:05 +0100

Nearly about a year passed since the last release of vfsStream, and some bugs were found by users of vfsStream. This was quite a surprise for me since I did not expect that anybody would use it.
This evening I fixed another bug reported some days ago, and since a patch for another bug was submitted and committed about half a year ago I decided to release version 0.3.2 tonight, so these are the changes:

- added support for trailing slashes on directories in vfsStream urls, patch provided by Gabriel Birke
- fixed bug #4: vfsstream can only be read once, reported by Christoph Bloemer
- enabled multiple iterations at the same time over the same directory

A big thank you to the bug reporters for their help to improve vfsStream. This should give me some motivation to go for 0.4.0 and implement support for file modes, at least being able to store and read them - full file mode support will be a hell of a work, not sure if it is worth the effort.

Stubbles 0.13.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:56:37 +0100

Today we released Stubbles 0.13.0. This release is a major breakthrough regarding integration of the Inversion of Control functionality. All web applications build with Stubbles can now be created via our Inversion of Control features, resulting in less code for the same power. In Stubbles this means we were able to throw away around 200 lines of code without loosing any functionality. Moreover, we got only slight performance penalties regarding runtime in our applications (around 0.01 seconds more), but experienced less memory usage (up to 512 K) especially in situations were we heavily relied on XJConf configurations before.

Beside this the release contains bugfixes and feature improvements. As always take a look at the changelog. However, don't look too much into our current documentation, it still needs to be updated to reflect the latest changes.

Stubbles 0.12.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:32:47 +0100

Some minutes ago we released Stubbles 0.12.0, containing various API improvements and bugfixes. Most notable changes are the introduction of the bootstrap.php file and the net::stubbles::lang::stubPathRegistry class, which in combination replace the old stubConfig file. This is a major improvement especially for command line scripts, as you may now change the pathes for cache, configuration, log and page data files during runtime, allowing a better way to create maintenance scripts for example.

The other new feature is the introduction of the input grid for the XML/XSL view engine, mainly contributed by Andreas Lehr. This feature allows fine-grained control over forms and their elements, ranging from placement of label elements and input fields to special information markers, but creates valid HTML markup as output. If used in conjunction with the delivered ingrid.css file you will get very fast valid and accessible forms. Unfortunately the documentation for this feature is still missing, but we hope to provide this soon.

For a full list of changes see the changelog.

Stubbles 0.11.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:05:42 +0100

Today we shipped Stubbles 0.11.0, one month later than originally planned and hurting our monthly release cycle. This is mostly due to vacation and time constraints. Unfortunately we have to delay the 0.12.0 and 1.0.0 releases as well, but this fits better into our current time schedule.

But as consolation 0.11.0 brings some really cool new features beside the usual bugfixes. One improvement is within the rss package, which now allows to annotate any entity with the newly introduced @RSSFeed annotation. This makes it much easier to create an rss feed from any object you have in your application.

The streams package experienced some improvements like the new memory stream wrapper and better checks for handles so that resources which are not of type stream will now be rejected.

Richard contributed an implementation of the FirePHP protocol which allows kind of var_dump() debugging in AJAX applications without breaking the functionality of the application itself when the value is dumped.

However the coolest new feature from my point of view is the new support for handling dates. We introduced a new net::stubbles::lang::types::stubDate class, which eases handling of dates. This would not be worth that much of enthusiasm for itself, but the coolest thing about this is that we added filters for transforming request input values into date instances, and moreover our persistance API supports date instances as return values from entities, persisting those into the database and returning them back from there into the entity. This way the developer only has to work with date instances as input and output values, and Stubbles takes care to provide the instances and to persist or serialize them.

As always, for a full list of changes see the changelog. Have fun!

Stubbles 0.10.0 released

nospam@example.com (Frank Kleine) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:53:59 +0200

Continuing our end-of-month release plan we released Stubbles 0.10.0 today. The release contains fixes and improvements regarding dealing with UTF-8: the string length validators now correctly work with UTF-8 strings, and console streams now deal with input-/output conversion from environment charset to internal charset.

As we are at streams, the streams package experienced an update with two new classes and a new interface: net::stubbles::streams::stubMemoryInputStream and net::stubbles::streams::stubMemoryOutputStream allows to deal with memory streams, and net::stubbles::streams::stubSeekable allows to mark streams as seekable. Both net::stubbles::streams::stubMemoryInputStream and net::stubbles::streams::stubFileInputStream implement this interface.

Another new interface is net::stubbles::peer::stubURLContainer which allows better unit testing of classes having net::stubbles::peer::stubURL or net::stubbles::peer::http::stubHTTPURL as typehints on methods.

An API breakage was made to the net::stubbles::console::stubExecutor interface and its net::stubbles::console::stubConsoleExecutor implementation. The executor now accepts a net::stubbles::streams::stubOutputStream to stream the output of the executed command to instead of returning the output of the executed script from its execute() method. This breakage allowed us to make the API more fluent and allow better method chaining.

Grab the release from our downloads page.