Tonight we in Gaiaware did a new release of
Gaia Ajax Widgets. Lots of people have been asking about our new features for this release are, and for the first time we're having difficulties answering that question.
Don't misunderstand me, we have done more with this release than what we have done with any other release earlier, though many things are of structural changes and most of them are about quality and not quantity.
Kariem has been working on a Unit Testing framework now ever since the last release. This "feature" isn't immediately visible for the end users of Gaia, but we now have more than 400 Unit Tests for Gaia which have helped us remove more than 100 bugs in the library. In addition this makes us "move faster" than what we previously have been able to do.
Another "feature" is our new build system. Sergey has been the hero here, and we now have what I would definitely claim is the best build system for .Net projects in the world. Derived from nAnt and adding up lots of custom tasks on top of that Sergey have been able to create a "what" and not "how" build system which is the first time I've ever seen in my life. What this means is that you supply "what" you want the build system to do and then the build system itself takes care of "how". To illustrate this difference think of it like the difference between the autonom neural system contra the conscious neural system. When you move your arm you're actually using close to 50 different muscles. If you would have had to to consciously turn on and off every single muscle in this process, this process would have been so complicated that humans wouldn't have been able to get out of bed in the morning.
A third "feature" is a change to our licensing system/logic. We now effectively have a solution for consultancy companies which makes it possible for them to use Gaia without having to pay but rather postpone the purchase to the customer upon delivery. This effectively have grown our potential market by 50% worldwide and made it possible for *everyone* to use Gaia Ajax Widgets. Jan has been doing a supernatural job on this part.
A fourth "feature" is that we've rebuilt our website completely to (hopefully) be able to communicate our message of the gains in using Gaia far better. Tobin and Liz have been the geniuses here.
A fifth "feature" is that we now have a binary installer with the complete installation process integrated within. This means that everyone can distribute the Gaia installer legally as they wish. This probably means that it won't take long time before you see CD distros of Gaia in developer magazines and such. Also you can run the same EXE file on both Windows and Linux if you have
Mono installed. Sergey and Jan have been working day and night with this for more than a month to get this working. If you think this is easy due to WinForms implementation on Mono, think again... Believe me!
A sixth feature is that we're now integrating Gaia with Visual Studio automagically during the installation process. This makes it far easier for our customers to start using Gaia. Not to mention that our "visibility" increases by orders of magnitudes for our Visual Studio users.
Most of the above things aren't really features in the traditional understanding, but every one of those will make the product experience increase a lot for our users. Also in addition to the above we have 22 "traditional" features like for instance we have upgraded to the latest version of
Prototype and
ScriptAculous. We have refactored the client side JavaScript a lot which makes a much more clean API for our users who wants to extend Gaia Controls. We now have support for custom error handling. All JavaScript executes much faster due to refactoring. We now have a true "queue system" for Ajax Requests. You can now call PageMethods on MasterPages. You can now trap click event for Accordion in your own server-side event handler. But for Gaiaware and you as our customer those are of far less value than the first "non-traditional" features ;)
The above list of features is a lot longer than what I have written here, and for the curios ones we've published
our complete changelog up til today which includes the changelog for Tranquility. But for the first time in Gaiaware's history the number of "traditional features" is not the list I am most proud of during a release of Gaia Ajax Widgets ;)
Some samples we have updated for the Tranquility release include;
Download Gaia Ajax Widgets