Jease 1.9.2 contains several minor fixes:
Depending on if you're updating Tomcat along with Jease or not, updating is mostly straightforward: simply copy jease/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/jease.jar and jease/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/jfix.jar to your existing installation and restart your server. Additionally you can fix your Page-Template by adding a div-tag with style="clear:both" between content area and editorial. If you're using News and running Jease on Jetty, you should copy jease/webapps/ROOT/site/service/feeds/* to your instance.That's it.
]]>Jease 1.9.1 contains a fix for a small bug in PropertyEditor, updates some translations and comes with CodeMirror 1.0. It also is bundled with Tomcat 7.0.12 which fixes security issues which shouldn't affect Jease at all, but better to be safe than sorry.
Depending on if you're updating Tomcat along with Jease or not, updating is mostly straightforward: simply copy jease/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/jease.jar and jease/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/codemirror.jar to your existing installation and restart your server. That's it.
]]>Please read carefully before upgrading:
Jease 1.9 is the last major release in the 1.x series and the first one which comes with "long term support". Long term support means that Jease 1.9 is "feature frozen" (so no new features will be added anymore), but I will provide bug-fixes and support until end of 2012 (and maybe longer if required). This way Jease 1.9 will provide you with a stable and supported platform to develop your custom content-management solutions. The main development with new features will done for the 2.x series.
This release adds some important new features to Jease besides some minor changes and a few important bug fixes. This first new feature is the option to run the CMS in "maintenance mode", so only administrators are allowed to work within the CMS, while all other editors are logged out automatically after having saved their current work. The user management screen shows now the last time a user accessed his session, so an administrator can see when the last editor is logged out.
Another feature is the introduction of a database persistent sequence generator. This can be used in combination with a Factory to create ids automatically or as a general counter for other purposes (e.g. a downloads counter).
In order to provide more user-friendly 404-error pages, Jease now supports a custom error page which can be set via a parameter. This way the error page can be displayed within the layout of your site.
Another interesting feature is the introduction of a global JEASE_SITE_REWRITER which is a post-processor for the resulting HTML. With a JEASE_SITE_REWRITER you can do fancy stuff like obfuscate email adresses, add additional markups which is translated server-side and so on.
To make the property support more useful, I've added a ScriptProperty which can act as a provider for choice/selection-properties. This way it is possible to create the options via Java code at runtime of the CMS.
Last but not least the Transit and Script content types have now an additional attribute called "forward" which allows to create non-HTML-content easily.
Please read carefully before upgrading:
This release adds a new content type called Gallery... the name says it all... a Gallery is a container for images which are rendered as image gallery. Along with the Gallery comes a new feature for creating thumbnails: just call any image delivered via Jease with an additional scale-parameter (http://server/...image.jpg?scale=200) which creates a (cached) thumbnail of your image with the given size.
The second new feature is an highly improved user management by introducing roles. A role defines which content types a user can create or edit. This is far more flexible than the former approach of differencing users in privileged and non-privileged users. Per default Jease creates two roles: Administrators and Editors (who are not allowed to create Scripts, Transits or Factories). You can easily change existing roles or add new roles. Additionally Jease stores now all passwords as MD5-hashes.
Another new feature is some improvements regarding the usability of the CMS: Jease allows now to change the root node in the tree navigation by simply clicking a "Go-Into" icon. This is very useful for deep nested content trees. Additionally the node viewer has a new toolbar button which opens the current page in a dedicated browser window (or tab).
Another important changes are some fixes in regard to UTF-8. There were some gaps where an explicit UTF-8 encoding was missing, so Jease fall back to the default encoding of the server (which could be something different than UTF-8). This could result in problems when migrating a Jease instance from a non-UTF-8 instance to a UTF-8 instance. I've fixed now all missing pieces, so that Jease runs from now on with UTF-8 regardless of the servers default encoding. Please read the encoding upgrade if you run into encoding problems now.
The 1.8 release fixed some missing explicit UTF-8 encodings. This doesn't make any difference if you're running your server already with UTF-8 as default encoding. If not, you might run into encoding issues with Files storing text-contents or Revisions and non-ASCII-characters. So if you use non-ASCII characters and your server didn't run with UTF-8 encoding, you might see garbled characters in Files (with content-type=text) or Revisions.
<%@page import="org.apache.commons.io.*,jfix.db4o.*,jease.cms.domain.*,jease.cmf.service.*"%>
<%
String encoding = "ISO-8859-1";
for(File file : Database.query(File.class)) {
if(file.getContentType().startsWith("text")) {
String str = FileUtils.readFileToString(file.getFile(), encoding);
FileUtils.writeStringToFile(file.getFile(), str, "UTF-8");
}
}
for(Version version : Database.query(Version.class)) {
String str = FileUtils.readFileToString(version.getBlob().getFile(), encoding);
FileUtils.writeStringToFile(version.getBlob().getFile(), str, "UTF-8");
}
%>
]]>If you're upgrading from Jease 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3, please read the upgrdade notice below before performing an update!
The most notable feature is the introduction of a community requested content type called "Discussion". It allows you to add comments or discussions to your site. Just add a Discussion object everywhere you like and let your users discuss your content. The public view of a Discussion uses a Captcha based on SimpleCaptcha to keep spam-bots out.
In addition to the Discussion feature, Jease provides RSS- and ATOM-feeds for published News per default. Thanks to Max for providing the ATOM-support.
In order to keep the owner of a Discussion informed about what is going on, I've implemented a general mail-service which is used to send out notifications about added comments. The mail-service can be used to send other emails as well. Please note: you have to configure a SMTP-server before you can use the mail-service.
Another new feature is the introduction of database-stored configuration parameters. This way almost all configuration parameters are moved from web.xml to the CMS where they can be edited directly through the web. And the best of all: you can create and use your own parameters easily.
Last but not least I've added a new design called "loop" which is now the default design for jease.org.
Jease 1.7 is bundled with Tomcat 7 as default servlet container.
You have to run an update-script to migrate existing revisions to new class format. Just call http://localhost:8080/cms/update/revisions.jsp after updating Jease to migrate the old revisions to the new format. It is highly recommended to create a backup of your database-directory (~/db4o or ~/perst) before doing the upgrade!
]]>This release brings a lot of new features and several bug fixes. The most prominent feature is the introduction of a content registry which allows you to create modules with your own content-types and editors more easily. The former reflection based configuration approach was nice on the first sight, but had to many drawbacks in the long run when you've started to add custom components and needed to maintain them within the default package structure of Jease.
Another important feature is the introduction of Factories. A Factory is a container for content prototypes which are used to synchronize properties of content types automatically. This way you can extend existing content-types with additional properties just within the CMS without touching any line of source code. Along with the Factory comes a new (and very) simple content-type called Item which can be used as building block for dynamic (property) based contents via a Factory (or as persistent container when storing results submitted via forms).
In order to give the administrator more control of the CMS, I've started to add a Control-Panel. The first feature is a manual revision control which allows to prune revisions based on content-type, revisioned days and total count just with a click.
A minor change in handling the authentification results in a big gain: If you need to authenticate your users against an existing identity management system, I've added an interface for pluggable authentication. You can define your own Authenticator and configure it via web.xml, so that it is possible to authenticate against any system which can somehow be connected via some lines of Java-code.
Last but not least I've added a reusable pager for the search results.
You have to run an update-script to migrate existing revisions to new class format. Just call http://localhost:8080/cms/update/revisions.jsp after updating Jease to migrate the old revisions to the new format. It is highly recommended to create a backup of your database-directory (~/db4o or ~/perst) before doing the upgrade!
]]>This release introduces properties for content-objects. Properties allow you to add editable fields to content objects directly through the CMS. You can use properties to drive special behaviours in your templates (e.g. mark a content object as important to give it a different visual style in a navigation), add extra information or select different templates for rendering the overall design. More usecases are left to your imagination. Properties are going to be the building block for upcoming releases where I'm going to introduce a concept of prototype based content-classes which can be completely manipulated through the CMS.
A second feature is a new design called "photo". It is a very classy design which overall impression can be easily altered by replacing the photo used in the header and applying a different color schema.
The third new feature is a much improved Mediafield which is used everywhere where files (esp. images) are stored and edited in the CMS. The Mediafield now does a much better job in scaling images.
With the release I'm going to provide more configuration options in web.xml, so it is easier to customize Jease in one central location. As new configurations it is now possible to configure the revision support based on revision counts and timestamps. Additionally you can configure the design to be used, so you don't need to touch Controller.jsp anymore.
My personal pride is a new feature which allows to compile and execute Java-Code on the fly. Jease uses this feature to provide support for "scripted" servlets via the Script-Object, but the used compiler-wrapper is very generic and can be used for other tasks where you want to build, compile and execute Java-Code at runtime of an application. This makes many uses of scripting languages finally obsolete for me... Java rulez in the long run!
I also updated the documention to reflect the new features...
You have to run an update-script to migrate existing revisions to new class format. Just call http://localhost:8080/cms/update/revisions.jsp after updating Jease to migrate the old revisions to the new format. It is highly recommended to create a backup of your database-directory (~/db4o or ~/perst) before doing the upgrade!
]]>This release is focused to improve the infrastructure for public web-sites. The most important feature is that you can easily integrate ZK-components via the ZUL-Markup-language in your web-site via the Script-Object provided by Jease. This gives you all the power from ZK with a highly customized web-site-layout of your choice.
As companion to the new ZUL-Integration the wrapper for the CodeMirror-Editor is now used as default editor for Scripts. CodeMirror provides syntax-highlighting which makes the editing of code snippets through the web much more pleasant.
Have a look at the showcase to see some examples:
http://www.jease.org/demo/zul/
Another important enhancement is a change for the lightbox-implementation. The formerly used Topup-Library seems to be unmaintained, so it is replaced by a jQuery-based implementation (prettyPhoto), which also allows to move forward with integration and use of jQuery which is now available as a dedicated JSP-service for public templates. Additionally an open-source video-player is now used for Media-Objects containing FLV-files.
Use own value class for revisions to provide more info (e.g. user).
Pleae note: You have to run an update-script to migrate existing revisions to new class format. Just call http://localhost:8080/cms/update/revisions.jsp after updating Jease to migrate the old revisions to the new format. It is highly recommended to create a backup of your database-directory (~/db4o or ~/perst) before doing the upgrade!
The second feature is the addition of two new designs (so called "paper" and "robot") which are selectable on the fly by the user. Just use the links at the bottom of the page to switch the design.
The third feature is an advanced preview-button (which is also added to the workspace accessory) which allows to preview contents inline in a dedicated viewer component based on a modal window. This is far more useable for unexperienced users working with Jease and also avoids problems with popup-blockers.
The switch to CKEditor needs to remove all dependencies to FCKEditor. The Link-/Imagebrowser for FCKEditor needed to be configured via a connector in WEB-INF/web.xml. Please remove the servlet-mapping for the FckConnector when updating your Jease-instance. You should also remove WEB-INF/lib/fckeditor.jar.
The second big improvement is the update to ZK 5.0.4 which has a highly improved memory usage on server side. Savings of memory between 40% up to 70% is really a lot for high-volume applications. Many thanks to the ZK-community for this fantastic improvement.
What does Content Revision Support mean?
Every time you click on "Save", you create a new revision of the current content object which is stored as file in the file-system of the Jease-Database. A Revision means that all fields of the content-object (including binary data) are serialized into a proper storage format (XML created via a properly configured XStream) and can be deserialized anytime from there again. This way you can compare the current version of a document with a version which was modified weeks ago.
The number of revisions to be kept is configurable (default: keep all revisions, see jease.cms.service.Revisions), although each revision introduces only minimal overhead.
With Jease 1.0, the public API is now frozen. This allows you to develop Content-Management-Systems on top of Jease without having to worry about future updates. In order to bring Jease into the best possible shape for this mission, I've done some refactorings and changes to the code base which might break your existing installations without appropriate adjustments, but all changes are so minor that you should get up and running within a few minutes again. I'm very proud on the fact that the structure of the content repository didn't change since version 0.1, so you can be sure that your data is stored in a proven, tested and reliable manner... and that's what really counts in the long run.
Please note: I've cleaned up and refactored the code base to bring it in shape for a 1.0 release, so maybe you'll have to touch some of your customized JSPs to make things work again (biggest change: site.service changed to site, so a simple find&replace should do the trick). I'm usually very conservative with this kind of breaking changes, but I really like to start 1.0 with a very clean code base with no historical cruft. The structure of the content-repository/database itself (and that's what count in the end) hasn't changed since the 0.1 release, so I'm quite confident that it will stay this way forever.
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Kudos to the ZK-Team for their support and very quick bug fixes... but to be honest: there were some nasty bugs in ZK5 which gave me a hard time to finish the migration from ZK3 to ZK5...
Further changes along the layers used in Jease:
And as always some more cleanups and refactorings... and... I've started to document important classes and methods, so don't complain there's no documentation in the code...;-)
]]>And as always: some additional cleanups and minor refactorings.
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As the version number tells you, this release is regarded as development-in-progress (although most of the underlying code-base is running in production for several years now).
Although Jease works very stable (and jease.org is done with Jease), be aware that APIs may change in upcoming releases as long as Jease isn't declared as 1.0.
]]>Your first mail to the group will be moderated to avoid spam.
]]>Jease is the result of my personal quest bringing tools and patterns together which make the life of a web-developer as simple as it can be.
]]>Just create a Script-Object within Jease with extension ".zul" and put you're ZUL-code in it. That's it.
ZK provides lots of nice components which allow to create powerful user interfaces without messing with HTML, CSS or Javascript. The ZK-Demo provides more examples.
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