Wt Release notes
Wt Release notes
This file lists important notes on migrating existing applications to
newer version of Wt. It lists changes in the library that may break
the way you build Wt, the way you configure Wt or the Wt API and
behaviour.
Release 3.3.8 (August 16, 2017)
This release consists of bug fixes and some new features:
-
OpenID Connect support
-
As we've previously announced
on our blog,
Wt now supports OpenID Connect. All you need to do to use any OpenID Connect based service is
configure a Wt::Auth::OidcService. You can also make your
own OpenID Connect identity provider. Check out the accompanying
OpenID Connect feature example.
-
On Windows: font support based on DirectWrite
-
Wt 3.3.7 already introduced the Direct2D backend for WRasterImage.
Wt 3.3.8 further expands
on this by adding DirectWrite-based font support. This means that Wt 3.3.8 will be able to
select the appropriate fonts for every glyph, without requiring Pango. Pango was always
difficult to distribute on Windows, so we never included Pango in the binary distribution, relying on
very basic font support instead, replacing unknown characters by question marks. Now, you
can expect much better Unicode support with DirectWrite on Windows.
This means that the binary release of Wt on Windows is now built with Direct2D and DirectWrite.
-
Wt::Dbo: added sql_value_traits for
Wt::Json::Object and
Wt::Json::Array.
-
Quite often, the need arises to store some unindexed data with arbitrary structure in a database.
A common solution is to store JSON as a string. To facilitate this, we've included implementations
of sql_value_traits for
Wt::Json::Object and
Wt::Json::Array in
Wt/Dbo/WtSqlTraits. This allows you to store Wt::Json Objects and Arrays
just like you any other field.
Additionally, we've made the Wt::Json API a bit more friendly, by adding support
for initializer lists (when using C++11), and implicit constructors for
Wt::Json::Value
from
Wt::Json::Object and
Wt::Json::Array.
-
Added <allowed-hosts> configuration option for CORS
-
Wt used to allow almost any origin, to allow Wt applications to be embedded in any page using
WidgetSet mode. Although Wt encodes session IDs in URLs rather than cookies by default, this
could still pose a security risk in some cases. In Wt 3.3.8, CORS support has been updated:
Wt now only allows cross-origin resource sharing for WidgetSet entry points, and trusts no
host by default. You can specify the allowed hosts using the <allowed-hosts>
tag in the configuration file. Using <allowed-hosts>*</allowed-hosts>
restores the old behaviour.
-
Other small improvements:
-
- Any boost::asio::io_service can now be used with Wt::Http::Client,
instead of just Wt::WIOService.
- Added support for PATCH requests in WResource and
Wt::Http::Client,
next to GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
- wthttp connector: added support for forward secrecy with the --ssl-prefer-server-ciphers option.
- Added the num-session-threads configuration parameter, to set the amount of threads per session when
using dedicated process mode. By default, the main process and the session threads use the same amount of threads.
- The te-benchmark
example was added, implementing the TechEmpower framework benchmarks.
This example also demonstrates how Wt can be used to write RESTful services. Improved, less verbose, support for
RESTful services is planned in a future release.
- Added Wt::Dbo::FixedSqlConnectionPool::setTimeout(), to set a timeout for obtaining a connection.
- Added Wt::Dbo::backend::Postgres::setTimeout(), to set a timeout for queries.
- Added libunwind support for printing stacktraces. Enable this with the ENABLE_UNWIND CMake option.
Release 3.3.7 (March 31, 2017)
This release fixes many bugs, but also introduces some new features:
-
WFileDropWidget
-
The WFileDropWidget is a new widget that allows you to upload a file or multiple files by dragging them onto an area.
-
Scroll visibility
-
Some applications require you to know whether a widget is currently visible within the viewport, or whether it is
scrolled out of view, e.g. to load more content as you scroll down the page. You can now enable scroll visibility
detection with
WWidget::setScrollVisibilityEnabled(bool),
and react to changes in visibility with
WWidget::scrollVisibilityChanged().
A new scrollvisibility feature example has been added to demonstrate this infinite scrolling application.
-
Touch events
-
Although Wt already supported touch interactions in the charting library, touch events were previously
not exposed by Wt. Now,
we've added WTouchEvent, and the touchStarted, touchEnded, and touchMoved
events have been added to
WInteractWidget.
Also, draggable widgets can now also
be dragged after a long press, and you can select a range using a double touch in
WTableView and WTreeView.
-
Combined session tracking mode
-
The default session tracking method for Wt is URL rewriting, using JavaScript to hide the session id from
the address bar. Alternatively, cookies can be used with the Auto option, falling back to URL rewriting when
cookies are not available. However, the cookie-based method did not allow for multiple sessions within the
same browser.
In order to make the URL rewriting method with requirement 6.5.10 of the PCI Data Security Standard, while not
sacrificing the ability to have multiple sessions, a new Combined session tracking strategy has been added.
Wt already makes it difficult to steal a session when the session id is discovered, but resources are not as
protected. The Combined session tracking strategy uses URL rewriting in combination with a cookie that is shared
between sessions as an extra measure against session hijacking. This is the most secure strategy, but it will
deny access if cookie support is not available.
-
Wraparound for WSpinBox and WTimeEdit
-
WSpinBox will now wrap around from its maximum to its minimum if you enable wraparound. WTimeEdit will take advantage of this feature by default.
-
On Windows: Direct2D implementation of WRasterImage
-
We've added another implementation for WRasterImage on Windows: Direct2D. When building Wt, this
implementation will be enabled by default. This allows to remove the dependency on GraphicsMagick or
Skia on Windows, simplifying the build process.
-
Some minor extra features:
-
-
It's now possible to retrieve a vector of all request headers with Wt::Http::Request::headers() in handleRequest when implementing a WResource. It is still recommended, and more efficient, to use headerValue, but retrieving a vector of all headers could be useful for debugging purposes.
-
In an effort to reduce the amount of JavaScript generated by the charting API, the
WPainter::drawStencilAlongPath()
method was added to WPainter.
-
Previously, WDialogs were movable by default. It's now possible to disable this with
WDialog::setMovable().
Release 3.3.6 (July 13, 2016)
This release has a focus on bug fixes and some new features:
-
Support for WebSocket compression in wthttp
-
WebSocket traffic is now compressed, if possible.
-
Time entry improvements
-
WTimeEdit now supports AM/PM in its format,
WTimeValidator now allows to select a minimum
and maximum time and supports multiple formats,
WTimePicker can now work up to
millisecond precision, and is now rendered with spinboxes.
-
Skia version updated
-
The Skia backend for WRasterImage is now compatible with more recent versions of Skia. If you need
to support an older version of Skia, use -DWT_SKIA_OLD=ON. The Skia version of the Windows builds
has been updated from 394c7bb to 834d9e1.
-
Wt::Dbo
-
-
It's now possible to mark foreign keys as literal with a “>” prefix, so Wt::Dbo can better map to
an existing schema. Note that for consistency, this also means that the schema generated for ManyToMany relationships
has been changed to include the id column names if a joinId has been specified. If you specify a joinId for ManyToMany
relationships, you'll have to change it to include a “>” before it in order to keep the same database schema.
-
The size argument of belongsTo() has been
removed, since it served no actual purpose.
-
Scroll position
-
It's now possible to retrieve the scroll position of a
WContainerWidget
with
scrollTop()
and
scrollLeft().
-
Invalidation of stateless slots
-
WObject::isNotStateless()
has been added, so functions called from functions that are marked as stateless can unmark
it as stateless, reverting to plain server-side dynamic UI updates.
-
Auth::Dbo::UserDatabase
-
The Dbo UserDatabase implementation now
compares e-mail addresses case insensitively. The AuthService
can be passed in the constructor, so the UserDatabase
knows whether the IdentityPolicy is EmailAddressIdentity.
-
Charting library
-
There have been many bug fixes and improvements to the charting library and the interactive features
introduced in Wt 3.3.5:
- Series can be selected
on a WCartesianChart.
LineSeries can be manipulated.
- WAxis::setZoom() and
WAxis::setPan()
have been deprecated in favor of the easier to use
WAxis::setZoomRange().
You can listen to changes in zoom range with the
WAxis::zoomRangeChanged() signal.
- Series set as hidden will still be shown on a WAxisSliderWidget.
The typical application for this is to show a coarse model on the slider widget, and a more detailed one on the chart.
-
In order to provide better performance for charts containing a lot of data, the charting library has been
overhauled to use WAbstractChartModels,
instead of WAbstractItemModels, avoiding the use of
boost::any. The WStandardChartProxyModel
wraps a WAbstractItemModel so that those can still be used with charts.
Note that this changes the return type of the
WAbstractChart::model() method.
- A chart's axes can now be inverted.
- Stacked series: negative values are now stacked separately from positive values.
- Curve labels can now be drawn on charts, so that curves,
or certain points on curves, can be labeled.
- WAxis::getLabelTicks()
has been modified with an argument
AxisConfig, so that different axis ticks can be drawn depending
on the side that the axis is dawn on, or the zoom level it is drawn at. This is a breaking change if you override getLabelTicks.
WAxis::setLabelTransform()
as a simpler method to change the tick
labels depending on the side the axis is drawn on.
- WDataSeries is no longer a simple value class. The interface of
WCartesianChart has been modified to reflect that: the old
interface that copies WDataSeries over has been deprecated in favor of an interface that takes pointers to
WDataSeries.
- It's now possible to specify a different model
for each WDataSeries.
- Chart::WPieChart::createLabelWidget()
has been added, making it possible to replace the labels of a
WPieChart
with widgets.
- Tooltips on charts can now be deferred, which can improve performance of interactive charts, and if you have a lot of tooltips.
Release 3.3.5 (Dec 31, 2015)
This release has a focus on bug fixes but also one or two new features:
-
Chart::WCartesianChart
-
WCartesianChart has several new features that allow interaction with the
chart without server roundtrips. These features include zoom, pan,
crosshair and follow curve functionality.
This is only available if the chart is drawn
on an HTML canvas. This is the default rendering method on modern browsers.
When enabled, the crosshair will follow mouse movement,
and show in the top right corner the coordinate
(according to X axis and the first Y axis) corresponding to this position.
-
Chart::WAxisSliderWidget
-
WAxisSliderWidget lets you easily focus on a particular range by selecting an XAxis. It will create a sliding widget where you can change the size of the focused region by dragging the blue handles, and change the position by dragging the selected area. When using touch, the size of this area can also be changed using a pinch movement.
-
WPainter, WJavascriptHandle, WCanvasPaintDevice
-
The above functionality was implemented by making client-side interaction possible for a scene rendered
on WCanvasPaintDevice. For this purpose, for several primitives used to draw on a canvas, we provide
a JavaScript handle and complementary API to manipulate these objects in JavaScript code. In this way you
can keep the bulk of the painting code in C++, and allow manipulation from within JavaScript.
Such JavaScript handlers have been made available for WTransform, WPen, WBrush, WPointF, WRectF and WPainterPath.
- WAnchor target (such as this window, or new window) moved to WLink
- As WLink is used in several places (including for example inside item data models), the target can now be specified in more places in the same consisten way. However, since until now a WAnchor was the owner of the TargetType, this may break existing code which calls WAnchor::setTarget() before WAnchor::setLink(), as the latter overrides the target.
- A new TargetDownload target was added for links.
- Until now it was recommended to use TargetNewWindow as otherwise this would interfere with the rendering of the current page (since browsers are unaware of the content-type and content-disposition of the target link until after it unloaded the current page. The new TargetDownload option is implemented using the new HTML5 download attribute or, if not supported, by targetting a hidden iFrame contained in the page.
- The included SQLite version was updated
-
The SQLite version bundled with Wt::Dbo has been updated to version 3.8.10.1. The changelog can be found here
- Support for seconds editing in WTimePicker
- WTimePicker was missing the seconds, we've also added the setSecondStep() method.
- WCheckBox::setPartialStateSelectable()
- Before it was only possible to set the partial state of the WCheckbox when creating the Widget.
We've added a method WCheckBox::setPartialStateSelectable(bool) which will allow the user to select indeterminate state. This is false by default;
- New client side connection monitor
- The WApplication::setConnectionMonitor() method will let the user register a Javascript object that will be notified on connection changes (connection, disconnection, websockets enabled/disabled..)
The monitor will trigger the onChange method of the provided Javascript object
- Support for custom HTML tags for a widgets
- We've added WWebWidget::setHtmlTagName() that will change the current html tag instead of using the one chosen by Wt by default. This allows the user to create widgets that are not provided by Wt, such as for example semantic tags.
- Wt::Dbo: allow to forward declare related classes
- It is now possible to forward declare all classes that are being referenced in a belongsTo(), hasOne() or hasMany() relation, helping to reduce the compile time pain of Wt::Dbo.
Release 3.3.4 (Mar 25, 2015)
This release has a focus on bug fixes but also one or two new features,
of which the following are the most notable:
-
Support for dedicated session processes with wthttp connector.
-
Until now, only the FastCGI connector allowed the use of dedicated
processes for individual sessions, by spawning a new process for
each new session. This functionality has also been added to the
wthttp connector. In this implementation, the manager process will
act as a reverse proxy to the dedicated session processes.
This has as major benefit that there is no longer a choice between
dedicated session processes on the one hand (supported by FastCGI)
and support for WebSockets on the other hand (supported by the
built-in httpd). In fact, there remains little reason to prefer
FastCGI over the built-in httpd: in those situations where you
want a proper http server as a front-end, you can still use
HAproxy or NGINX (or Apache, if you must) as a reverse proxy to
wthttp.
-
WIdentityProxyModel
-
This new proxy model simply forwards the structure of the source
model, without any transformation, and can be used for
implementing proxy models that reimplement data(), but retain all
other characteristics of the source model.
-
Chart::WAbstractChart::setAutoLayoutEnabled()
-
Until now, you were responsible for configuring the padding around
the chart area to accomodate for axis labels, titles, and
legend. While this is still the default behaviour, we added an
option to let the chart derive the required padding (using
approximate font-metrics available server-side).
-
Chart::WCartesianChart::setAxis()
-
Whereas previously a chart axis was a "value class", it is now a
proper polyymorphic class, and you can provide your own
implementation. In this way you can customize things like for
example label strings.
-
Several new features in the 3D charts library.
-
Release 3.3.3 (May 27, 2014)
This release has a focus on bug fixes but also one or two new features:
-
Improved Meta header support.
-
Because WApplication meta header API was restricted to only work
in certain circumstances, we have now added the ability to define
meta headers (with the option to apply them to specific user agents)
also in the configuration file.
-
WWidget::setDeferredToolTip()
-
This function is an alternative to setToolTip(), useful when a
tooltip text is not trivial to fetch or create. Using this
function, the tool tip (HTML) text can now be loaded on-demand
instead of needing to be preset on (each) widget. This also works
for tooltips set from a WAbstractItemModel using the
new ItemHasDeferredTooltip
item flag.
-
WLineEdit::setInputMask()
-
Support for input masks was added, which guides the user to enter
data in the correct format.
Release 3.3.2 (March 12, 2014)
This release has a focus on bug fixes and a few larger new developments.
A) New classes:
-
3D Charts
(Chart::WCartesian3DChart, ...)
-
A 3D charting library was added, based on
WGLWidget, and integrated
with the existing 2D charting framework.
-
Dbo::JsonSerializer
-
This is a utility which serializes Dbo objects (including
relations) to JSon, leveraging the same persist() function used
for serialization to the database.
B) Main improvements:
-
WBootstrapTheme
-
Support for bootstrap version 3 was added, so now you have the
choice between botstrap version 2 or 3. Needless to say, you
should probably target version 3 for new development work if you
can live with its restricted browser support.
-
WGLWidget
-
Next to the existing client-side WebGL-based implementation, a
server-side OpenGL-based implementation was added for fallback
scenarios where WebGL is not available, or when scene complexity
is so big that a server-side solution is simply better performing
because of lower bandwidth needed.
-
WRasterImage
-
Next to the GraphicsMagick-based implementation, a skia-based
implementation has been added (which provides much higher
performance most notably on Windows platforms).
-
WString
-
Until now, Wt defaults to the C++ global locale for conversion
between a string literal (std::string, const char *) and
WString. In practice, UTF-8 is an (increasingly) better choice
since UTF-8 is a pragmatic encoding covering the entire Unicode
range, and the encoding used by the library throughout. We've now
added a setDefaultEncoding() function which can be used to
configure the default encoding as UTF-8.
-
wthttp HTTP/WebSockets front-end server
-
We've given the http front-end a much needed overhaul, making it
deal better with long-lived connections typical for WebSockets
applications, and fix some nasty issues at the same time.
We also took the opportunity to optimize its performance by
reducing the number of system calls for writing request
responses, and by avoiding memory allocations during request parsing.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
WDatePicker,
WDateEdit
-
The date pickers will now default to interpreting a single click
as a date selection and also closing the calendar.
Release 3.3.1 (October, 16 2013)
This release has a focus on bug fixes and other cleanups after the big
changes that went into 3.3.0.
A) New classes:
-
WLocalDateTime
-
So far, the library only provided date/time classes that dealt with
UTC time (or that at least is the intended use). In this release
we have added functionality to also deal with date's in a specific
time zone, which includes this new type as well as improvements in
WDateTime to convert to local date time, and time zone information
in WEnvironment and WLocale.
B) Main improvements:
-
WComboBox
-
The combo box now interprets LevelRole data to display headers
(using HTML <optgroup< elements). Another improvement is
that now the combobox saves its single selection while the model
is updated.
-
WDialog
-
Modal dialogs can now be created and destroyed in any order
without confusing the 'silk screen'. We now also consistently
interpret an enter press in the dialog to invoke the default
button added to the dialog footer (if there is one).
-
WMessageBox
-
Several improvements include the ability to indicate what buttons
are the default and escape buttons with setDefaultButton() or
button->setDefault() and setEscapeButton(), and the (long overdue)
implementation of icons!
-
WTextEdit
-
We've added support for TinyMCE 4.
-
Signal
-
For boost versions 1.52 or later, we now support the
Boost.Signals2 library for the signals implementation.
-
Render library
-
We've added a CSS style sheet parser which will parse and apply
style rules in <style> blocks (or loaded through the API),
and expanded CSS support to much improvemed table rendering
(including border-collapse border model and repeated table
headers), relative/absolute positioning, and page-break-before/after
support.
-
Auth::AbstractUserDatabase
-
A setIdentity() method was added to modify an existing identity
(e.g. username) and updateAuthToken() was added to update an
existing token (e.g. keeping the expiration time but changing the
hash).
-
Dbo::Query
-
Added a reset() function which resets previous bound arguments.
-
Dbo::QueryModel
-
The model now implements toRawIndex() and fromRawIndex() methods to
allow selection to persist across layout changes (e.g. resorting).
-
Wt::Json (JSON library)
-
We've added serialization functions to complement the parsing API.
-
Wt::Mail (SMTP library)
-
We've added attachment support, and optional indication of the local
sender date.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
WDate,
WDateTime
WTime
-
We've deprecated the exceptions (Invalid[Date][Time]Exception)
that were thrown by these classes when one attempted to compute or
use an 'invalid' value. These exceptions are no longer thrown.
Instead, we now documented what value
(usually 'null') is returned when one attempts to do operations on
such a date/time class, which makes the behaviour more consistent
with how Qt's equivalent classes behave.
-
WMessageBox
-
The buttons() method has been renamed to standardButtons(), and
buttons() now return the actual list of added buttons.
Release 3.3.0 (April, 8 2013)
This release focusses on a reorganization of Wt's theme
infrastructure, with the objective of
supporting Twitter's
Bootstrap CSS framework as a new theme. At the same time we've
added a number of widgets for which Twitter Bootstrap provides
styling.
It is our intention to support the Bootstrap theme (or more
specifically, the Bootstrap class names) alongside the themes we
already supported (which are based on our own class names). Ignoring
what Bootstrap brings, you should be able to upgrade to this release
without too much trouble, although you may need to adapt some CSS
stylesheets as we did reorganize a number of things which were
required for Bootstrap and were a good idea for our own CSS
stlesheets too.
A) New classes:
-
WTheme,
WCssTheme,
WBootstrapTheme,
-
Theme support classes for Wt. The role of a theme is to:
- Load the CSS stylesheets for a new session
- Annotate newly created widgets with appropriate style
classes
-
WDateEdit
-
Functionally almost the same as a WDatePicker, this class
specializes WLineEdit and is thus a WFormWidget, making it much
easier to use in WTemplateFormView.
-
WLocale
-
This class supports localization for number formatting and
extends the simple localization support we had in the previous
versions of Wt (which as only effect had the selection of
a different language for the resource bundles). It's main
added value of native C++ support for localization is that it
also affects client-side handling and parsing of number values,
i.e. in WIntValidator and
WDoubleValidator.
-
WNavigationBar
-
A navigation bar styles a menu as a typical top-level bar
(currently only styled in the Bootstrap Theme).
-
WPopupWidget
-
A base class to simplify the creation of popup widgets that
typically assist in editing or provide circumstancial information
for another widget.
-
WSplitButton
-
A split button, which combines a button and a popup menu
(currently only styled in the Bootstrap Theme).
-
WToolBar
-
A button tool bar (currently only styled in the Bootstrap Theme)
-
Dbo::MySQL
-
A MariaDB/MySQL backend for Wt::Dbo. This is based on the work
from Paul Harrisson who maintained this backend so far outside the
Wt distribution. The backend has been designed for MariaDB, but
should work fine for MySQL as well.
B) Main improvements:
-
Mail::Message
-
Added API support for additional SMTP headers.
-
WDatePicker,
WSuggestionPopup
-
The setGlobalPopup() functionality has been deprecated and does no
longer have any effect, since a new improved algorithm is being
used to anchor the popup to the DOM which no longer requires this
workaround.
-
WDialog
-
Addition of a footer() method that returns a container for dialog
footer elements, typically buttons.
-
WFormModel
-
Addition of a validator() function that returns the validator for
a field set using setValidator(),
-
WGLWidget
-
Support for binary transfers which avoids serialization and
deserialization of floats to text.
-
WPushButton
-
A push button can now act as a toggle button, using setCheckable()
and related API (currently only styled in the Bootstrap Theme) and
can be linked to a popup menu using setMenu().
-
WStackedWidget
-
When switching between current widgets, the stacked widget will
now record and restore the current scroll position, providing a
much improved user experience when using the stacked widget for
the 'main' contents of an application.
-
WStringListModel
-
Full support was added for storing data of all roles, lifting the
requirement to use another model such as WStandardItemModel for
simple MVC widgets like WComboBox or WSuggestionPopup simply to be
able to store UserRole data.
-
WTemplate
-
Added a new standard function (Functions::block) which allows the
definition and use of a macro block inside a placeholder, which is
in particular useful for forms which have repetitive formatting
for each field.
-
WTemplateFormView
-
Several API improvements: A new setFormWidget() allows the
definition of the form widget for editing a field which
is a more useful alternative compared to reimplement
createFormWidget(). It also allows the optional
definition of functions to update the view/model values, which
avoids the need for specializing updateViewField() and
updateModelField() these latter two functions have been deprecated
in favour of two new functions updateViewValue() and
updateModelValue() which only update the value but not other
aspects such as visibility, validation state, or messages.
-
Built-in httpd improvements
-
A redundant copy operation of the response generated and sent by
Wt has been removed, using scatter-gather I/O implemented by
boost::asio instead.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
WMenuItem
-
While in previous version of Wt, this class was only a data class
that held the information related to an item, in 3.3.0 we modified
this so that this class represents the widget itself. If you were
redefining protected methods to customize the widget
(i.e. createItemWidget() and updateItemWidget()), then this will no
longer work as expected. The new system should be easier to
customize (since you can simply specialize WMenuItem itself).
In addition, we've simplified the rendering of a menu item so that
a redundant layer of spans (or div's) has been removed. It makes
the menu more consistent with the way CSS designers expect a menu
to rendered, and this was done (you can guess the theme of this
release by now ?) to be compatible with bootstrap's CSS styles.
-
WApplication::locale()
-
This now returns a WLocale object instead of the string
designation of the locale (which you can query by calling name())
on the locale object.
-
WCalendar
-
The markup for this class has changed, and thus customized CSS
will need to be updated.
-
WPopupMenuItem
-
The popup menu item class has been merged with WMenuItem (and
WPopupMenu is now a specialized WMenu). This should not have
noticable API changes, except for the changes in markup and CSS
documented above.
-
WTreeNode,
WTreeTable
WTreeView
-
The markup for tree rendering has been changed (to using nested
unordered list instead of nested tables), and thus customized CSS
will need to be updated. The only API consequence is that
WTreeNode::labelArea() is no longer returning a WTableCell but
instead a WContainerWidget.
-
WTreeView,
WTableView
-
Event handling (clicked(), doubleClicked(), ... ) has been
generalized: events that are not generated on an item (but for
example in empty space below the items) will now also
generate these events, but then with an invalid model index.
You may thus need to adapt current code to check whether the model
index that is returned is valid.
Release 3.2.3 (November, 1 2012)
This release contains mostly bug fixes and one new feature: a payment
processing API.
A) New namespaces:
-
Wt::Payment (payment handling)
-
This namespace contains services and back-end classes for dealing
with online payment brokers. At the moment there is support for
PayPal's Express Checkout service.
B) Main improvements:
-
Layout improvements.
-
If you had massive trouble migrating to 3.2.2 because of the
layout rewrite, then you'll appreciate the efforts we've made to
make the layout algorithms in 3.2.3 much more robust and
consistent.
-
Dbo::QueryModel:
added a mechanism for stable row data.
-
A common nuisance when working with the QueryModel (which
retrieves data from the database as needed), is that concurrent
database modifications such as insertions of new data, may
interfere with the model's mapping of rows to objects (this is
in fact a common problem with most ORM's indeed). This mapping
may be important, especially when you want to process the user's
selection of one or more rows selected by the user, in e.g. a
table view. We've added a mechanism to assure that one can
request the model for data at a given row, which is guaranteed
to be the same row that has been previously retrieved, using the
stableResultRow() method. It works by default for simple queries
(returning data from one table), but can be easily customized
for more complex queries.
-
Render library:
improved support for %-based block sizes and table rendering
-
Support was added for %-based sizes for block widths and table
cell widths. In addition, table rendering in Wt::Render has been
improved to support repeating headers (<thead> sections)
for multi-page tables, and explicit page breaks (using the css
page-break-after/before properties).
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
Dbo::backend::Sqlite3
-
We've changed the implementation of the storage ISO8601AsText
format for time stamps (datetime). In the new, corrected,
implementation, we generate dates using 'T' as the separator
between date and time (as mandated by ISO8601), while the old
behaviour used a space (' ') instead as the
separator. Sqlite3 supports either format equally. This may
however break some applications which use queries for an exact
date (or a date comparison), as the results may be affected.
The old behaviour is still available as PseudoISO8601AsText,
which can be configured using
connection.setDateTimeStorage(Wt::Dbo::SqlDateTime,
Wt::Dbo::backend::Sqlite3::PseudoISO8601AsText)
Release 3.2.2 (July, 23 2012)
This release contains mostly bug and feature improvements, but
also a rewrite of the layout managers in Wt (WBoxLayout and
WGridLayout), and this comes with some changes in (in most cases
previously undefined) behaviour.
A) New classes:
-
WSslInfo
-
Class containing information on a client-side certificate that may
have been configured for a SSL connection, and which can be used
for authentication (accessible from
WEnvironment).
-
Wt::Dbo::weak_ptr
-
A weak variant of Wt::Dbo::ptr which is used to implement
One-to-One relations (see also
Wt::Dbo::hasOne()
).
B) Main improvements:
-
Rewrite of WBoxLayout, WGridLayout
-
The layout managers have been reimplement, to address various
issues with the old implementation, including API (in particular the wonked
side-effects of AlignTop | AlignJustify) inconsistencies and bugs.
The new implementation no longer uses tables when JavaScript
is available, but instead using JavaScript-based layout with
absolute positioning. The table-based implementation is still kept
for plain HTML sessions (and progressive bootstrap). The code now
uses exactly the same layout logic for both horizontal and
vertical layout (but giving precedence to horizontal layout) and
should be much more consistent (and perhaps also more
performant). However, because of the many complexities and
problems with the old code (inconsistent behaviour), you may see
issues while upgrading. Please see the "Non-backwards compatible
changes" below for hints on how to deal with this.
-
WAbstractItemView
-
A drag & drop mime-type can now be specified on a per-item
basis using a new ItemDataRole,
and the mime-type for the entire selection is computed
from these individual mime-types.
-
WInteractWidget
-
A new method setMouseOverDelay() allows to specify a delay for
generating the mouseWentOver() event.
-
Auth::AbstractUserDatabase
-
A new method deleteUser() was added, which deletes a user and all
related authentication information.
-
Chart::WCartesianChart
-
A new method setAxisPadding() was added, which configures the
amount of adding between the chart area and the axes.
-
Chart::WDataSeries
-
A new method setCustomMarker() was added which allows the use of a
user-defined path for the markers. A new role
MarkserScaleFactorRole was added which allows overriding the
marker size based on item model data.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
WBoxLayout, WGridLayout
-
While migrating old code to this version, here are some tips:
Alignment flags
Previously, specifying an alignment for a widget in a
layout, or for the layout when set to a container, had a double
meaning. Not only would it implement the given alignment but also
revert to passively letting HTML layout decide the layout of the
contents, and adjust the parent (layout respectively container)
accordingly. This had all kinds of side effects such as not
propagating the size of layout-size-aware widgets and quirks in
the vertical alignment.
WContainerWidget::setLayout(layout, alignment) has been
deprecated and will be removed from a future release. This call
was almost always used to let the parent container resize to fit
the size of the contained children, instead of fitting children
in the parent container. This behaviour is now
automatically deduced based on an (empty) size of the parent
container. In case this heuristic does not work, then setting a
non-0 maximum size on the container using setMaximumSize() will
act as a trigger, with the added benefit that the parent will only
be allowed to resize up to a specified maximum size.
An alignment specified in
W(Box/Grid)Layout::addWidget(widget, stretch, alignment) now
purely affects the alignment but has no other side effects. The
perferred and minimum sizes of a child widget or layout is now
always taken into account.
Child item sizes
The layout algorithm is now implemented entirely in
JavaScript, and is more gentle when dealing with a combination
of cells (or columns/rows) that have a stretch factor and others
that don't. Previously, a minimum (or fixed) size would be used
to layout items that do not have a stretch factor. This had for
example as a consequence that a WText would be narrowed down to its
minimum width by using word wrapping throughout. Now, the
preferred size is used for a child item, and shrinking to a minimum
size only if necessary.
Progressive bootstrap
A layout in the first page of an application rendered using
progressive bootstrap will no longer fully upgrade to a full
JavaScript version, but will result in a hybrid (between
table-based and JavaScript-based). If it doesn't work out as you'ld
expect, then you should reconsider the use of progressive bootstrap,
or the use of a layout manager in your first page.
Release 3.2.1 (March 16, 2012)
This release contains mostly bug and feature improvements.
A) New classes:
-
WFormModel
-
A model class for forms. These models are used in Wt::Auth as the
basis for RegistrationModel and AuthModel, and allow a more
straight-forward customization of the underlying behavior of these
forms.
-
WReadOnlyProxyModel
-
A proxy model class which allows to share a source model
read-only between multiple sessions.
-
WTemplateFormView
-
A WTemplate-based standard view implementation that works in conjunction
with WFormModel.
-
Auth::AuthModel
-
A model that implements authentication logic.
-
Auth::FacebookService
-
An OAuth-2.0 based authentication service implementation for
Facebook.
-
Wt::Utils
-
This namespace contains a number of utility functions that we
found useful in projects using Wt. They relate mostly to
lower-level encoding and decoding functions: base64-, hex-, html-,
and url-encoding/decoding.
B) Main improvements:
-
WApplication
-
A new method, WApplication::bind(), is useful in combination with
WServer::post() to avoid posting to a method of a deleted object,
leveraging the same life-time tracking as with signal connections.
-
Render library
-
A large number of performance improvements, especially for table
layout and rendering.
-
Chart::WAxis
-
DateScale and DateTimeScale axes have improved auto-configuration of
limits and timesteps, now taking into account the resolution.
-
Dbo::Transaction
-
We've modified the default transaction outcome: a transaction will
now automatically commit(), unless the transaction is being
destroyed (goes out of scope) because an exception is being
thrown, in which case the transaction will rollback(). Previously,
an uncomitted transaction would always rollback() on destruction.
-
Dbo::ptr
-
Added a session() method, returning the session with which the
session has been associated.
-
Shipped SHA-1 implementation.
-
We now ship a SHA-1 implementation with Wt and this thus relaxes
the need for OpenSSL to implement WebSockets and
Auth::SHA1HashFunction.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
WTextEdit
-
Due to backwards incompatiblity of IE9, we now require the latest
version of TinyMCE (3.5b1 or later).
-
Auth::AuthWidget
-
A number of API methods that configure and access the configuration
were moved to the new Auth::AuthModel class which can be accessed from
the widget using model().
-
Auth::AbstractPasswordService::AbstractStrengthValidator
-
The API was simplified to be less unorthodox: validate() now
returns a Result that contains all the information for it.
-
Http::Client
-
We've changed the signature of the parseUrl() utility function to
parse the URL into a URL structure instead of a collection of
string parameters.
Release 3.2.0 (November 29, 2011)
This release contains a number of new modules, as well as the usual
batch of bug
fixes and small feature improvements.
In this release we also change the WValidator API in a way that it
is likely to break existing applications.
A) New namespaces:
-
Wt::Json (JSON handling)
-
This namespace contains classes (Object, Value, Array) which map
the JSON types in C++. It also contains a parser to deserialize
JSON. A writer to serialize to JSON hasn't been added yet.
-
Wt::Mail (SMTP protocol)
-
This namespace contains a Client to send mail messages. It is
currently offering only limited functionality w.r.t. SMTP protocol
handling, but contains enough functionality to send standards
compliant plain-text/HTML mails, with full support for unicode.
-
Wt::Auth (Authentication)
-
This namespace contains model and view classes for
authentication. It implements password authentication using best
practices, email verifiation, remember-me tokens, and provisions
support for federated login with an implementation of OAuth 2.0
for authentication using third party identity providers.
We expect that the API may still evolve, especially with
respect to OAuth 2.0 (which is a draft protocol), and its use
for OpenID Connect, which is the main use case for OAuth within
the authentication module.
B) New classes:
-
WException
-
We have cleaned up the use of exceptions within Wt. We have
converted numerous cases where an exception used to be thrown to
error logging, if the exception was thrown to indicate an API
problem. When the API problem is not resulting in a corrupt state,
we now log the error instead of terminating the session. All other
cases now use an exception that implements WException. This does
not affect situations where a std::exception was advertised in the
API.
-
WIOService
-
Previously, boost::asio was used only in the built-in httpd as a
portable asynchronous I/O reactor implementation. We have now
moved this into the Wt library itself, where it is now used
instead of a dedicated thread pool for dispatching requests (and
other server events), and where it is also used for asynchronous
I/O by e.g. the Http::Client.
The WIOService specializes a boost::asio::service, and integrates
the thread pool that runs the service.
-
WStringStream
-
This is a utility class that we have used since long in Wt. It is
a more efficient replacement for std::stringstream, with mostly a
compatible API (at least for our purposes). For our purposes it is
typically a factor of two or more faster.
-
Http::Client,
Http::Message
-
We have added an implementation of a Http(s) client. The client
is intended for consuming web services in Wt, and handles GET or
POST requests. It is not suitable (yet) for large responses, since
it buffers the entire response internally.
The client uses asynchronous I/O, using the WIOService that is
found in the current WServer instance.
-
Dbo::Firebird
-
Lukasz Matuszewski contributed a Firebird backend
implementation, thanks !
C) Main improvements:
-
WAbstractItemView
-
Added a setHeaderWordWrap() method which configures header text
word wrapping, and changed setHeaderAlignemnt() so that it now
allows to change both the horizontal and vertical alignment. This
replaces the previously interwoven API for both features using the
multiLine parameter in setHeaderHeight(), which has been
deprecated. The rendering of the header items has been
reimplemented, simplified, and cleaned up in the process, avoiding
rendering problems on IE browsers.
-
WApplication
-
Two new methods, deferRendering() and resumeRendering() can be
used to defer the rendering phase in response to the current
event-loop request. This is useful for situations where you are
waiting for an asynchronous operation to complete, but want to
handle this synchronously in the user-interface (i.e. blocking the
interface until the operation completes). While this is not a good
idea in general, it may be useful if you can guarantee that the
event will arrive within an acceptible time (e.g. 1 second). This
effectively stalls the response to the current request, but avoids
blocking threads in the process.
-
WDialog
-
Added setClosable(), which adds a close icon into the title bar.
-
WFormWidget
-
We have cleaned up the use of exceptions within Wt. We have
converted numerous cases where an exception used to be thrown to
error logging, if the exception was thrown to indicate an API
problem. When the API problem is not resulting in a corrupt state,
we now log the error instead of terminating the session. All other
cases now use an exception that implements WException. This does
not affect situations where a std::exception was advertised in the
API.
-
WLogger
-
We have reorganized the logging within Wt. Internally, a number
of macros are now used for logging, with as default
implementation our own (simple) logger, but which can be
redefined to use instead another logging framework of your
choice, as some have rightfully requested.
But we've also improved our logger so that it now can be
configured to filter only certain information, based on type and
scope. This is mostly useful for debuggin and development of Wt
itself, since it allows us to switch on debugging output, in a
fine-grained way, in a debug build.
Finally, a new global function has been added (Wt::log()) which
selects an appropriate logger for logging and is more convenient
than WApplication::log() which required an application instance.
-
WTemplate
-
Arguments to bound functions are now parsed and passed to
the resolveString() methods.
Two new constructs have been added: conditions and
functions. Conditions allow certain parts of a template to be
skipped or included based on a bound condition. Functions are
useful to automatically resolve certain variables, two built-in
functions are implemented: one to resolve strings in a message
resource bundle ("tr"), and another to resolve the id of a bound
widget ("id").
-
Dbo::collection<T>
-
We've added front() methods that return the first element.
-
Built-in httpd connector
-
We have expanded the WebSockets implementation to cover newer
versions of the WebSockets protocol (draft): next to 00, we now
also support 07, 08 and 13 protocols (with draft-17 semantics).
-
Configuration
-
On UNIX-like platforms, and using the built-in httpd connector,
SIGHUP is caught in the WServer::waitForShutdown() utility function,
and the configuration file (wt_config.xml) is reread.
-
Several security improvements
-
- DoS mitigation
- We have added two measures to prevent DoS attacks that try
to exhaust the server by spawning sessions. This is in
particular a risk when deploying using the progressive bootstrap
method, since then a plain HTML session can be spawned with a
single request.
- Plain sessions may be limited to constitute only a
fraction of the total number of sessions. This is configured
using the <plain-ajax-sessions-ratio-limit>
configuration option.
- Ajax sessions need to confirm their "intelligence" by
solving a puzzle which requires them to properly parse the
(ever-changing) JavaScript and HTML.
- Compromised session ID risk reduction
-
A compromised session ID no longer can be used to hijack that
session.
- A full page refresh (using the session ID to rerender
the current application state) is no longer allowed unless
both client IP address and user-agent are unchanged. To
still enable page refresh in this situation, you may
configure the use of a cookie which can be used to confirm
the original browser (although that cookie will not be
used for session tracking), using the
<session-id-cookie> setting.
-
The session ID cannot be used to POST events to an Ajax
session, since these require proof of other ever-changing
context specific information, notably a pageId and ackId.
D) Non-backwards compatible changes
-
Build options
- The HTTP_WITH_SSL option has been removed, and is now replaced
by WT_WITH_SSL -- OpenSSL is now a dependency of Wt inherited by
the httpd.
-
WValidator
-
We broke the validate() method, to return a new WValidator::Result
instead of WValidator::State. The main improvement is that the
validation may also return a text which contains information on
why validation failed. This makes the API consistent with the
client-side API, and obviously much more useful. It will break
existing application that call validate() or have reimplemented
validate() in a custom validation class.
-
WTestEnvironment
-
This class has moved to a pseudo-connector library
(libwttest). This was needed to be able to use asynchronous I/O
(such as Http::Client) in test cases, which rely on a WIOService
fournished by a WServer instance.
Release 3.1.11 (September 23, 2011)
This release
contains many
bug fixes and a few new features.
A) New classes:
-
WLink
-
This class unifies the different link types used in Wt, in a
single value class. Depending on the context, a link may refer to
a URL, a resource, or an internal path. We've updated the API
throughout to replace the function overloads for these different
cases with a single usage of WLink, simplifying the API (but don't
worry, we left the old methods, albeit depricated).
-
WMediaPlayer
-
A media player has been added which provides a unified framework
for playing audio and video, and which deals with cross-browser
issues (chosing a suitable implementation per browser). We've also
renamed WHTML5Audio, WHTML5Video, and WHTML5Media to WAudio,
WVideo and WAbstractMedia respectively (since well, everything
will eventually be HTML5, no ?).
B) Main improvements:
-
WResource,
Http::ResponseContinuation
-
Currently, you can already stream the output of a big resource in
little chunks, using a continuation to resume sending the next
part. We've now added API methods
(WResourceContinuation::waitForMoreData() and
WResource::haveMoreData()) to allow a resource to suspend its
response because it is currently lacking more data, to continue
later when new data is available (and without tying up a thread).
-
WDialog
-
Added an option setResizable() which puts a resize handle in the
bottom right corner.
-
WPopupMenu,
WPopupMenuItem
-
Added a triggered() signal, and an option to automatically cancel
the popup menu when the mouse leaves the menu (after a
delay). We've also added the possibility to link a popup menu item
with a WLink, and the option to make the item which has a submenu
item also itself selectable.
-
Dbo::Session
-
The load() method has an additional, optional parameter, to force
rereading the copy from the database.
-
Dbo::collection<C>
-
Added a count() method which uses a query to determine whether the
collection contains an element.
-
Test::WTestEnvironment
-
Added dialogExecuted() and popupExecuted() methods which allow to
interact with a reentrant eventloop from a test plan.
C) Non-backwards compatible changes
The item data roles InternalPathRole and UrlRole have been removed,
and replaced by a LinkRole (which contains a WLink value instead).
D) Deprecated API
With the introduction of WLink, the following API is being deprecated
(although it can be argued that some of these may be kept for
convenience):
-
WAbstractArea::setRef(): use WAbstractArea::setLink() instead.
-
WAbstractArea::ref(): use WAbstractArea::link() instead.
-
WAbstractArea::setResource(): use WAbstractArea::setLink() instead.
-
WAbstractArea::resource(): use WAbstractArea::link() instead.
-
WAnchor::setRef(): use WAnchor::setLink() instead.
-
WAnchor::ref(): use WAnchor::link() instead.
-
WAnchor::setResource(): use WAnchor::setLink() instead.
-
WAnchor::resource(): use WAnchor::link() instead.
-
WAnchor::setRefInternalPath(): use WAnchor::setLink() instead.
-
WImage::setImageRef(): use WImage::setImageLink() instead.
-
WImage::imageRef(): use WImage::imageLink() instead.
-
WImage::setResource(): use WImage::setLink() instead.
-
WImage::resource(): use WImage::link() instead.
-
WStandardItem::setInternalPath(): use WStandardItem::setLink() instead.
-
WStandardItem::internalPath(): use WStandardItem::link() instead.
-
WStandardItem::setUrl(): use WStandardItem::setLink() instead.
-
WStandardItem::url(): use WStandardItem::link() instead.
The following classes have been renamed, and the old name is being
deprecated:
-
WHTMLMedia is now WAbstractMedia.
-
WHTMLVideo is now WVideo
-
WHTMLAudio is now WAudio
Release 3.1.10 (July 8, 2011)
This release contains a mix of new features and bug fixes
A) New classes:
-
WAnimation
-
We have added support for animations to show or hide widgets (used
in WWidget::setHidden(),
and WStackedWidget). These
animations will only be used when the browser supports CSS3
animations (at the moment of writing that includes latest Firefox,
Chrome and Safari releases).
-
WStreamResource
-
Dmitriy Igrishin factored this out of the WFileResource since most
of its functionality (continuations, range support) could be
generalized to streaming from a std::istream.
B) Main improvements:
-
Allowing multiple WServer instances.
-
Apparently for no good reasons at all, some singletons were still
around which prevented you from instantiating
multiple application servers. Now
you can (but only using the built-in httpd) instantiate multiple
servers side by side in the same process, which may server the
same or different web applications over different ports. A feature
example (multiple_servers) shows how that works.
-
Internal path encoding in WTemplate and WText
-
The
new
setInternalPathEncoding()
method will, if needed, enable reencoding of <a> anchors
which reference internal paths consistent with how in the
current session internal paths need to be dealt with (which
depends on whether the browser supports Ajax and HTML5 History).
Since this requires an additional XML parsing step (but the
rapidxml parser that is used is ... rapid !), it is off by
default.
-
WApplication::findWidget()
-
Like WWidget::findWidget(), but on the whole application,
including widgets outside the WApplication::root().
-
WApplication::changeSessionId()
-
Generates a new session ID for the application. This is useful to prevent
session fixation attacks by changing the session ID when a user has
authenticated successfully.
-
WResource::setDispositionType()
-
This method allows to specify how the browser should preferably
show a (non-HTML) resource.
-
WTable
-
Methods were added
to move
a row
or a
column. In addition we added methods
to WTableRow
and WTableColumn for
accessing cells in the given row or column.
-
WTextEdit
-
Various improvements to allow more flexible access to TinyMCE
settings on a per-instance basis.
-
WWidget::setToolTip()
-
An additional argument was added which may specify the use of
XHTML tooltips, which are implemented using a <div>.
-
Dbo::collection<T>
-
Make insert() and erase() also work for a collection involved in a
1-N relation
-
Dbo::ptr<C>
-
Improved modify() behaviour returns a proxy object which marks the
the object dirty also from its destructor, avoiding situations where
the transaction is flushed during a modification and remainig changes
are forgotten.
-
Dbo::Dbo<C>
-
Added setDirty() and self() methods.
-
Dbo::backend::Sqlite3
-
The packaged sqlite3 version was bumped from 3.6.20 to 3.7.6
C) Non-backwwards compatible changes
- The signature of the virtual method WWidget::setHidden() has changed.
-
Probably the biggest breaking change since long, this was needed
to add support for animations. This will break existing code which
specializes the WWidget::setHidden() method. This code should be
updated to pass the WAnimation object.
Release 3.1.9 (April 7, 2011)
This release contains mostly bug fixes and quality improvements.
A) New classes:
-
WAbstractSpinBox,
WDoubleSpinBox
-
Refactored and reimplemented the spinbox control into an integer
and floating point version, which may be implemented either using
a native HTML5 element or a portable Wt implementation.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
-
Internal path handling: HTML5 History API
-
When the browser supports the HTML5 History API, URLs are now the
same for plain HTML and Ajax-enabled session (i.e. without the '#'
trick). This can improve load time and improves the
user-experience.
To avoid problems of resolving resources with relative URLs, a
new property 'baseURL' can be used (that can be configured in
wt_config.xml), which allows all relative URLs be resolved from
the same location.
-
Internal path handling: no ugly internal paths ('?_=/path')
-
The configuration option (--docroot) for the built-in
httpd allows to specify folders with static paths and when doing
so, all other requests are forwarded to the application, which in
turn does no longer need to rely on the ugly '?_=' query parameter
to encode its internal paths.
-
WPdfImage, WRasterImage
-
Improved font support: the library can be optionally built to use
libpango for resolving characters to glyphs. This allows text to
be rendered using a mix of different fonts that all provide only
partial coverage for the entire unicode range. Note that for
WPdfImage, this currently requires use of a libharu fork
(https://github.com/kdeforche/libharu/tree/)
-
WAbstractItemView,
WTableView and WTreeView
-
Implementation of setRowHeaderCount() which fixes the number of
columns that are used as row headers and remain fixed while
scrolling horiziontally through the table. This replaces the now
deprecated setColumn1Fixed() API.
-
WRasterImage
-
Several quality improvements: correct rendering of alpha
compositing, text rendering by libpango,
-
WSlider
-
The slider has been reimplemented to allow for using either the
native HTML5 slider control, or the Wt implementation. The Wt
implementation can now also be styled through CSS.
-
WRun(),
WServer::addEntryPoint()
-
The callback function is now a boost::function<> object, allowing
you to bind other variables into the callback function.
-
WServer::post()
-
A safe method to post events to a session, and a useful
alternative to WApplication::UpdateLock. The simplechat and
codeview examples were converted to illustrate this method rather
than the (dead-lock prone) WApplication::UpdateLock approach.
-
WString::trn()
-
Implementation of plural string resolution, with locale-dependent
rules. The implementation provided
by WMessageResourceBundle
allows the same kind of expressions as GNU ngettext().
-
Chart::WAxis::setResolution()
-
Allows to specify the minimum chart axis resolution (contributed by Gaetano Mendola).
-
Dbo::Transaction
-
Fixed an issue with internal inconsistencies after transaction rollback.
C) Non-backwwards compatible changes
- Changed i18n keys for Wt.WDate.Mon-Sun
and Wt.Date.Jan-Dec
-
We were pointed out the fact that the built-in i18n keys for WDate
month names had a collision for the month 'May', which had the
same key for the abbreviated 3-letter variant as the full length
variant. Therefore in this release we reformatted the abbreviated
3-letter variant keys to Wt.WDate.3.Mon-Sun
and Wt.WDate.3.Jan-Dec. You will need to update your own
languages copies of these (or better, contribute them and we'll
maintain them for you!).
D) Android and iPad/iPhone targets
This release contains initial work on supporting Android and
iPad/iPhone as targets for deploying Wt applications within a webkit
view widget.
For iPad/iPhone, we added a script that builds Wt as an OSX Framework
which may be used in XCode to build iOS applications.
For Android, we added support for building the library and examples as
shared objects which are packaged together with a small Java project
which instantiates a WebView, into standalone APK files.
This is ongoing work. We need to improve support in Wt for Mobile
Webkit to make the applications look and behave more as native
applications on these devices.
Release 3.1.8 (Feb 4, 2011)
This release contains mostly bug fixes, quality improvements,
and a few new features.
A) New classes:
- WFontMetrics
-
A font metrics class. Font metrics are only available for
WPdfImage, and an implementation is planned for WRasterImage.
- Render::WTextRenderer,
Render::WPdfRenderer
-
A renderer class for a subset of XHTML, useful for e.g.~generating
PDF reports.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
-
WAbstractItemView::setHeaderItemDelegate()
-
Rendering of header cells is now also delegated and can be customized.
-
WAbstractItemView::scrollTo()
-
Scroll to a particular item.
-
WApplication::setLayoutDirection()
-
Added support for Right-To-Left (mirrored) layouts, typically used
with some middle-Eastern languages. In addition to HTML's built-in
support for RTL directionality, layout managers, tables and MVC
tree/table views render their columns in the opposite order.
-
WBoxLayout, WGridLayout, WBorderLayout
-
Empty layout items do longer create padding, and thus padding
collapses around empty items (both horizontally and vertically).
-
WEvent::eventType()
-
Information on the event type may be used during WApplication::notify()
for e.g. detecting user activity.
-
WGoogleMap
-
Added support for Google API version 3, alongside version 2.
-
WPdfImage
-
Added support true type font loading, a UTF8 patch for libharu is
pending to enable full unicode support text rendering.
-
WWidget::setWidth(),
WWidget::setHeight()
-
Convenience methods for resize() for only width or height.
-
Chart::WCartesianChart
-
A number of methods to customize the location and look of the legend.
-
Chart::WDataSeries::setXSeriesColumn()
-
Allow use of a specific X series for each data series in scatter plots.
-
Dbo::belongsTo(), Dbo::hasMany()
-
Support for foreign key constraints (NotNull, OnDeleteCascade, etc...).
-
Dbo::Session::rereadAll()
-
Can be optionally given a single table name to reread (discard) all object
data from a single class/table.
-
Dbo::sql_value_traits<bool>, Dbo::sql_value_traits<long>
-
Added mappings for C++ bool and long types.
C) API and other changes:
-
CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)
-
A communication method between browser and server is now chosen
based on the needs (same origin or cross-origin), and based on
browser support. Cross-Origin requests are now supported for both
Ajax and WebSockets, and are are chosen if available and needed,
reverting to dynamic script-tags otherwise.
The WApplication::setAjaxMethod() has no effect anymore, and has
been deprecated.
-
Bootstrap process has changed.
-
While tracking bootstrapping problems on IE8 (resulting in a blank
page instead of a shiny app), we not only found a good workaround
for that, but also found a way to implement the default bootstrap
mode so that the stylesheets are applied before the application is
rendered. This solves the annoying flicker you experienced with
the default bootstrap mode, and also allows us to remove a number
of workarounds for IE. As a result of various cleanups, more CSS
stylesheet rules have been pushed out to the external wt.css
(theme) stylesheet. If you've created your own theme, you will
need to take note.
-
Wt::BrushStyle
-
Wt::WBrushstyle has been renamed to Wt::BrushStyle. This makes it
consistent with the naming conventions of other enums. Sorry, our
mistake !
Release 3.1.7 (Nov 26, 2010)
This release contains mostly bug fixes, quality improvements,
and a few new features.
Note: the package was updated (3.1.7a) on Nov 30 to fix a layouting
regression.
A) New classes:
- WGLWidget
-
A preview of WebGL support in Wt (work in progress).
B) Main new features in existing classes:
-
WAbstractItemView
- Added API for hiding columns.
-
WCartesianChart,
WPieChart
-
Added support for ToolTipRole data, using WAbstractArea interactive areas.
-
Dbo::Session::rereadAll()
-
Reread all transient objects, as a catch-all solution to stale
data (data modified in another session).
-
WInteractWidget
- Added support for touch and gesture events (Mobile webkit).
C) Misc:
-
WebSocket protocol support (experimental)
- Use of WebSocket for communication between browser and server
can now be used, by enabling <web-sockets> in the
configuration file (we're likely to turn this on by default in a
future version. There is automatic fallback to the current
XMLHttpRequest based communication if WebSockets are not available
or communication could not be established. WebSockets is only
available using the built-in httpd server (which is now also a
WebSocket server).
-
Build improvements
-
- Provide a workaround for broken g++ compiler shipped in Ubuntu
Maverick
- Provide support for building without using
std::wstring (-DWT_NO_STD_WSTRING) or std::locale
(-DWT_NO_STD_LOCALE=OFF) support.
Release 3.1.6 (Oct 29, 2010)
This release contains a healthy mix of bug fixes, quality improvements,
and new features. And hopefully no regressions :-)
A) New classes:
- SyncLock<Lock>
-
A dead-lock avoidance adaptor for a Boost mutex lock, which provides
a controlled way of releasing the current application lock.
- WProgressBar
-
A progress bar, contributed by Thomas Suckow.
- WSpinBox
-
A spin box.
- boost_any_traits<Type>
-
A traits class for customized interpretation of data stored in a
boost::any. You can register a new type using registerType<Type>.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
-
Native support for MSIE 9
-
MSIE 9 (Beta) is now supported in all its goodness, including support
for HTML5 canvas and (almost working) support for SVG.
-
WApplication::UpdateLock
- The lock is now a RIAA lock, getUpdateLock() has been deprecated.
The lock needs also to be tested against validity (using operator bool()):
when invalid the session that it is trying to lock is being destroyed.
-
WApplication::setConfirmCloseMessage()
- Provide the user with a message to confirm navigating away from the
application.
-
WApplication::unload()
- Rather then waiting for the session to expire, an application
that is navigated away iis now notified of this and will by
default quit().
-
WApplication::addMetaHeader()
- Can now be used to specify "http-equiv" meta headers too.
-
WDatePicker::changed()
- I wonder how we ever did without.
- WAbstractArea::mouseWheel(),
WInteractWidget::mouseWheel(),
WMouseEvent::wheelDelta()
-
Added mouseWheel() event.
- WFileUpload
-
Added support for the simultaneous upload of multiple files (HTML5
"multiple") attribute and showing a progress bar to show upload
progress.
- WFormWidget::hasFocus()
-
Returns whether the widget currently has the keyboard focus.
- WHTML5Media
-
Added events to catch play, pause, play-back progress and volume
changes.
- WLineEdit, WTextArea
-
Added currentPosition(), selectionStart(),
selectedText(), and hasSelectedText() methods to retrieve
the current cursor position and selection.
- WPushButton::setRef()
-
Utility method to create an anchor that looks like a button, or a
button that behaves like an anchor, depending on your point of
view. There is also setResource() to set a resource as
target.
-
WResource
- Added API for upload progress tracking.
-
Http::Request
- Added support for HTTP request byte ranges, and this is now
interpreted by both the WFileResource and built-in httpd for static
files.
-
Http::Response
- Added setContentLength() which allows you to specify the
lenght of the response in advance, proving a better user experience
for large downloads.
-
Dbo::Session::query()
- Switched to a more complete Boost.Spirit parser for SQL queries, which
understands most of the SQL syntax, including functions,
"with ... select ... ".
-
Dbo::QueryModel
- Added support for custom column header names and changing the
undelrying query using setQuery() while preserving the current
column definitions.
-
Dbo::SqlStatement
- Added boost::posix_time::time_duration type support.
-
Dbo::sql_value_traits<WTime>
- Added template specialization for WTime.
Release 3.1.5 (Sep 10, 2010)
This release contains mostly bug fixes.
A) Main Changes
- WGridLayout,
WBoxLayout
- Optimized client-side rendering performance. Previously, every layout
manager used would automatically slowdown every event because it would try
to relayout each time. This is no longer the case.
- WSocketNotifier
- The socket notifier has been resurrected (it was in an perpetual state
of brokeness) and now works reliably across targets.
B) Changes that may break existing applications:
1) Built-in resource bundles
Starting with this version, Wt uses an internal message resource
bundle for the few strings it provides by itself (like for example
'Ok' for the ok button in a WMessageBox, or the days-of-week in WDate).
Previously, an ugly API was used in
WMessageBox,
WCalendar,
and
WDatePicker
using a boolean 'i18n' parameter in the constructor. All this has now been removed,
and instead the keys for these built-in strings have been documented. If you were
using these classes your application will no longer build, you can simply remove the
internationalization parameter and you will need to fix the keys you used for the
messages according to the documentation.
Any localized strings you use will take precedence over these built-ins.
All affected classes (only those listed above actually have changed API and behaviour) are:
- WAbstractItemView
- the paging tool bar buttons for graceful callback.
- WCalendar
- because of WDate
- WDate and WDateTime
- week days, month names
- WDatePicker
- because of WCalendar and for the close button
- WDefaultLoadingIndicator
- loading text
- WInPlaceEdit
- save and cancel button text
- WMessageBox
- standard buttons
- WLoadingIndicator
- standard buttons
- Validators
- for the messages they display in case of error
2) Other behavioural changes
- WDialog
- Escape will no longer result in the dialog being rejected. You can
enable this behaviour using the rejectWhenEscaped() method.
Release 3.1.4 (Aug 13, 2010)
This release contains several new features, but also a few changes
that break backwards compatibility (but are unlikely to affect an
average application).
A) New classes:
-
WBatchEditProxyModel
- A proxy model that caches editing operations to commit them atomically.
- WHTML5Audio
- Audio support using the HTML5 audio tag.
- WPdfImage
- A WPaintDevice that writes to Pdf (using libharu).
- WRasterImage
- A WPaintDevice that writes to a Png/Gif (using GraphicsMagick).
- ISAPI connector
- (Windows only) a connector that implements the Microsoft ISAPI
API, to integrate directly into Microsoft IIS. On Windows, this is
an alternative deployment option next to the built-in httpd.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
-
WAbstractItemView
- Added support for validators while editing.
-
WApplication
- Added an appRoot() method this returns the value of the
special property "approot" which can in some cases be defined
implicitly by a connector (such as ISAPI), and which allows an
application to reference working files whereas previously it was
assumed that they were in the working directory (CWD).
-
WEnvironment::agent() and related
- Convenience methods that return pre-parsed user agent identification,
should you want to differentiate based on browser.
-
WWidget::addStyleClass(), WWidget::removeStyleClass()
- Added addStyleClass() and removeStyleClass() methods.
-
WMenu, WMenuItem
- Added support for closable and disabled items (not complete,
CSS is lacking for polished theme). Contributed by Dmitriy Igrishin.
-
WModelIndex
- Added support for in-place (destructive) encoding to and
decoding from a raw index, making this less of a hassle for View
classes.
-
WSortFilterProxyModel
- Added support for row insertion/removal.
-
WSuggestionPopup
- Allow usage as an advanced combo-box, with an explicit drop down
button and ability to react to a selection.
-
Dbo::id()
- Support for natural keys (possibly of composite type) next to the
built-in surrogate keys.
-
Dbo::dbo_traits<C>
- By specializing this traits class, you can modify the surrogate id
field name (or disable it), and the optimistic version lock field
name (or disable it).
-
Dbo::Session::query()
- More robust query parsing (of the 'select' part), including
support for "select distinct".
-
Dbo::QueryModel
- Added editing support (editing the model will modify the queried
dbo's).
-
Dbo::query_result_traits<C>
- Added setValue(), create(), add() and remove() methods for modifying
queried results.
C) Changes that break existing applications:
- Dbo::Dbo
-
This class is now a templated with the class name itself, in
order to provide the proper type for the (natural or surrogate) id
field for id(). You will need to replace
class User : public Wt::Dbo { ... }
with
class User : public Wt::Dbo<User> { ... }
- CSS
- The toplevel container used by Wt is now given a position:
relative style; this was needed to be able to position widgets
(such as popups) using position: absolute, but may break
application layouts. You can override this CSS style by adding
.Wt-domRoot { position: static; } to your application's
(internal or external) stylesheet.
Release 3.1.3 (May 20, 2010)
This release several new features, but also a few changes that
break backwards compatibility (but are unlikely to affect an average
application).
A) New classes:
- SignalBase,
EventSignalBase
- Abstract base classes for signals (these are not actually new,
but they were not yet part of the API).
- WHTML5Video
- Video support using the HTML5 video tag (work-in-progress).
- Dbo::Call
- Class for executing a database call.
-
Dbo::SqlConnectionPool,
Dbo::FixedSqlConnectionPool
- Connection pool interface and implementation.
- Dbo::QueryModel
- An tabular item model for query results.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- WAbstractItemDelegate
- Added methods for editing: editState(), setEditState(),
setModelData() and closeEditor().
- WAbstractItemView
New editing API: edit(), closeEditor(), saveEditedValue(),
setEditOptions(), setEditTriggers().
Graceful degradation support using a paging navigation bar, which
may be customized by reimplementing createPageNavigationBar().
- WCalendar, WDatePicker
- Added setBottom() and setTop() methods to specify a valid range.
- WInteractWidget
- Added a mouseDragged() event for responding to mouse moves while
a mouse button is down.
- WItemDelegate
- Implements editing using a WLineEdit.
- WMenu
- Can now be used without a contents stack.
- WSuggestionPopup
- Added API to support dynamic server-side filtering.
- WTableView
- New implementation which supports horizontal and vertical
virtual scrolling, column resizing, drag and drop, etc... like
WTreeView.
- Chart::WPieChart
- Supports now also a shadow effect.
- Dbo::collection
- A find() method has been added to refine the query of a many-side relational.
- Dbo::ptr
- A version() method returns the current version.
- Dbo::Query
- An extra template parameter specifies a binding strategy. The
default binding strategy is DynamicBinding, which allows reuse of
the query object, and provides new API to modify the query:
where(), orderBy(), groupBy(), offset(), limit().
- Dbo::Session
- Added support for use with a connection pool. Added execute()
method to execute an SQL statement.
- Built-in httpd
- Support for HTTP Range header and partial content servering.
C) Changes that break existing applications:
- Dbo::sql_result_traits
- This traits class has been renamed to query_result_traits and
its API has changed considerably. This will only impact when you
have implemented a custom traits specialization. The getColumns()
method has been replaced with a getFields() method, and the
loadValues() method has been renamed to load(). A getValues()
method has been added which provides conversion to boost::any's.
- WTableView
- This View class was reimplemented to have functionality
comparable to WTreeView. In the process, we had to abandon the
underlying <table> representation because of rendering
issues with Chrome (of all browsers!), although the WTableView
documentation specifically promised that we would keep this.
Release 3.1.2 (March 26, 2010)
This release contains mostly bug fixes, and a few new features.
A) New classes:
- WShadow
- Class representing a drop shadow effect (see below).
- Dbo/backend/Postgres
- A Postgres backend has landed, contributed by Hilary Cheng.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- WBoxLayout, WGridLayout
- Addition of horizontal and vertical splitter support (resize handles to
allow the user to adjust the layout), sponsored by Eurofer. The new API
methods are setResizable(), setColumnResizable() and setRowResizable()
- WCalendar
- Improved the API to allow custom cell rendering, and custom handling
of selection. We have also made the API for selection consistent with other
widgets (like WTreeView), deprecating the old API.
- WDateTime
- Added toPosixTime() and fromPosixTime() methods to interoperate with
boost::posix_time::ptime.
- WFormWidget
- Added a setEmptyText() method to implement a label inside a line edit or text area.
- WPainter
- Added a setShadow() method which defines a drop shadow to be used for subsequent
drawing actions.
- WResource
- Added a setInternalPath() method which allow a resource to be deployed at a deterministic and "pretty" URL.
- WString
- Added constructors that take a std::locale for interpreting a narrow
string in a given locale.
- WWidget
- Added setLayoutSizeAware() and layoutSizeChanged() methods which allow a widget to react to layout size changes.
- Http::Request
- Added access to the request method().
- Http::Response
- Added a setStatus() method to modify the response status.
- Dbo::Session
- Added support for schema qualified tables, in
Session::mapClass() and the joinTable specified in hasMany().
Added API for dropping the schema: dropTables().
Added support for arbitrary queries in Session::query(), including
queries that do not return result or do not select from tables.
- Dbo::field()
- Allow size suggestion for std::string and WString mappings
- Dbo::SqlConnection, Dbo::SqlStatement
- Added support for floating point types, binary data (using std::vector<unsigned char>) and date and date/time types.
Added methods for return dialect-specific information.
Added properties API.
- Dbo::sql_value_traits
- Added support for backend-specific type mapping.
- (internal) DomElement
- Performance improvements in serializing the widgets to HTML
and/or JavaScript
- Built-in httpd
- Added a configuration option --max-request-size to
limit the size of a POST instead of the built-in default of 40
MB
Added a configuration option
--max-memory-request-size to limit the size of a POST that
is handed in-memory. Bigger POSTs are handled using a spool file.
Release 3.1.1 (February 17, 2010)
The minimum boost version is now 1.36.
This release handles mostly bug fixes, with as most visible change
an update of the polished theme, which is now considered
complete.
A) Security fixes:
Because of the following fixes for security problems, we recommend anyone
to upgrade live deployments of his application to the latest version.
- Possible XSS vulnerability
- Fixed a possible XSS attack where a user follows a link to a Wt web
application, taking advantage of unchecked insertions of the URL when
redirecting to the canonical page.
- Possible UTF-8 vulnerability
- Form values and JSignal arguments received from the browser are
now checked for sane UTF-8 encoding.
B) New classes:
- Dbo/Dbo
- An optional base class for a database object, providing access to its
id() and session().
C) Main new features in existing classes:
- WCanvasPaintDevice
- Now implements native text rendering on Firefox and latest
Chrome and Safari browsers
- WInPlaceEdit
- Added a setEmptyText() method which sets the text to be
displayed when value is empty.
- WPopopMenu
- Added an exec(WWidget *location, Orientation orientation) method which
popups the menu besides another widget.
- WSuggestionPopup
- This class is now also style by the CSS theme.
- WTemplate
- Avoids now rerendering of already bound widgets when the
template is rerendered.
- WTree,
WTreeNode,
WTreeTable,
WTreeTableNode
- These widgets are now theme-aware, and tree decoration styling
is provided by the theme. The setImagePack() APIs are now
no-ops
- WWidget
- Added positionAt() method which positions a widget (absolutely) besides
another widget.
- Chart/WAxis>
- Added a setLabelFont() method.
- Http/Request
- Added serverName(), serverPort(), path(), pathInfo(),
queryString(), urlScheme(), in(), contentType(), contentLength(),
userAgent() and clientAddress() methods which expose information
form the HTTP request to WResources.
D) Build changes:
- XML_FEATURES
- This CMake option has been removed, and Mini-XML has been
replaced by a modified RapidXML xml parser (mostly because of the
hard-to-interpret Mini-XML license), but there are also nice
performance improvements.
Release 3.1.0 (December 29, 2009)
This release contains several new features and classes, after a long
period of stabilization that happened before the 3.0.0 release.
A) New classes:
- WAggregateProxyModel
- A model that provides support for drilling down through columns, supported
by WTreeView.
- WCombinedLocalizedStrings
- Combines different localized strings implementations.
- WDateTime
- Combines a calendar date (WDate) and a clock time (WTime).
- WTemplate
- Use an XHTML fragment as a template, with variables that are place
holders for strings or other widgets. See the blog example of how this
class can be used to simplify HTML/CSS based layout of widgets and
contents.
- WTime
- Represents a clock time (0-24 hours).
- Wt::Dbo
- An Object Relational Mapping library. See the tutorial here.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
Most inline CSS styles have been pushed out to an external style
sheet, which may be themed. The "default" theme provides the old look,
while a new "polished" theme provides a less boring (?) look for
several widgets (work in progress). The theme can be set using
WApplication::setCssTheme().
As a result, you will need to deploy Wt's
"resources/"
folder, which contains the themes in
"resources/themes/", for
all but the most trivial applications.
- Signal
- Added a template connect() method which may be given any function
object, providing also support for the (future) c++1x lambda functions.
- WCanvasDevice
- Several optimizations to output more concise JavaScript.
- WPaintedWidget
- When width and/or height is not set using resize(), the widget
will now properly react to layout management when put into a layout
manager, triggering a server-side rerendering when needed.
- WSlider
- A sliderMoved() signal was added which is fired whenever the slider is
moved (but not yet released).
- WWidget
- Added a find() method which searches the widget hierachy for a widget
with a particular objectName().
- WServer
- Added an addResource() method to bind static resources to particular
URLs (i.e. resources that are not bound to a specific session).
- Ext::Container
- Will now properly react to layout management from a layout that
is set for a WContainerWidget.
- Ext::FormField
- Added changed(), blurred() and focussed() signals.
- Chart::WAxis
- Added setAutoLimits() and autoLimits() methods to configure which limits
are to be determined based on the data, and which are explicitly set.
- Chart::WDataSeries
- Added the setHidden() and hidden() methods to enable or disable
a data series. Added setBarWidth() and barWidth() methods to set the
width of a bar (useful mostly for scatter plots). Added
setMarkerSize() and markerSize() methos.
- Chart::WCartesianChart
- Use MarkerPenColorRole and MarkerBrushColorRole to override
colors for makers on a per data point basis. Added mapFromDevice()
and mapToDevice() methods for mapping device coordinates to chart
coordinates and vice-versa
C) API Changes:
- WSlider
- Not really an API change, but the vertical slider is now showing
the maximum value at its top side, not its bottom side.
- Chart::WAxis
- The minimum() and maximum() methods will now return the calculated
minimum and maximum value when they are to be automatically calculated based
on the data, configured using setAutoLimits()
D) Build changes:
- XML_FEATURES
- A new configuration option, XML_FEATURES, was added which allows the library to be built without MiniXML (and disabling fatures that require Mini-XML support). This configuration option is likely to be removed again in future versions.
- Documentation
- A doc directive was added, which uses doxygen and asciidoc tools
to generate the reference documentation and tutorial.
- Tests
- Automated tests were added for non-interactive functionality,
and are built by default.
Release 3.0.0 (November 3, 2009)
This release contains mostly bug fixes, build improvements and
documentation improvements compared to the latest pre-release
(2.99.5).
Most build improvements are related to finding the boost
libraries. Previously, Wt used a custom script, since CMake versions
< 2.6 did not provide a good enough script for finding
boost. Starting with this release, when using CMake 2.6 or later, Wt
will use the script that comes with CMake. You can still fall back to
the script that comes with Wt, which is still used for older versions
of CMake, by defining one of the BOOST_COMPILER or BOOST_VERSION
variables.
A) New classes:
No new classes
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- WDialog
- It is now possible to have multiple modal dialogs, and nested
recursive event loops.
-
WWidget
- The setDisabled() method moved up
from WFormWidget to WWidget.
-
JSlot
- The exec() method now passes object and event to the
JavaScript event handler.
C) API Changes:
- WResource
- The handling of changes to the resource has been sanitized. A
new method, setChanged() was added which must be called
to notify users of the resource that the resource was changed. In
addition to the existing generateUrl() which generates
a new URL, a method was added which merely returns the existing
URL: url(). With these improvements, a resource can
effictively be shared by many view widgets and updated with the
minimum of bandwidth usage.
Release 2.99.5 (September 1, 2009)
This release contains mostly bug fixes. The previous release (2.99.4)
contains some critical bugs that cause mayhem on IE, and a regression
with server push.
Release 2.99.4 (August 27, 2009)
!! This release contains bugs that render it unusable on IE !!
This release contains mostly bug fixes and back-end improvements. The
most exciting new feature is the addition of a new bootstrap method,
which implements progressive enhancements (starting with a plain HTML
page, and then upgrading it to an AJAX page if the browser has
support), see
also the
documentation.
A) New classes:
- WTableView
- This is a simple MVC View class that renders tabular data
in the most straight forward way using an HTML table element
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- Ext::ToolBar
- Added insert() methods.
- WApplication
- Added an enableAjax() method which notifies the application that
a session is being enhanced with AJAX capabilities when using the
progressive bootstrap method.
- WWidget
- Added an enableAjax() method which enhanced the widget with AJAX
capabilities when using the progressive bootstrap method.
- WCssDecorationStyle
- Add support for custom cursors.
- WServer
- For FastCGI deployments, the proxy process which directs FastCGI
requests to the correct session process is now also
multi-threaded.
C) API Changes:
- The WApplication::notify() behavior changed.
- Previously during a request, this method was called multiple
times during event propagation and rendering of the
application. Now, the method is called exactly once for each
request. In this way, it becomes a useful entry point to also manage
resource usage during (and inbetween) requests.
Release 2.99.3 (July 24, 2009)
This release contains mostly bug fixes and small feature
improvements. The most notable change that might affect existing
applications is a simplified internal path API behavior.
A) New classes:
- WAbstractItemDelegate
and WItemDelegate
- WAbstractItemDelegate is a helper class used
by WTreeView (and in the future perhaps other view
classes) to render contents. The standard
implementation, WItemDelegate maintains the default
implementation that was previously integrated
in WTreeView. The delegate will be responsible for
editing features in WTreeView in the future, and in
fact, you can already implement a custom item delegate that does
editing if you cannot wait for it!
- Test/WTestEnvironment
- WTestEnvironment is an environment class which is useful for
(unit) test-cases: it allows the instantiation of a
WApplication so that you may include widgets in unit tests.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
C) API Changes:
- change of WApplication::internalPathChanged() semantics.
- The old behavior was that a single internal path change caused
by the user (e.g. by moving forward/backword through his browser
history) would cause repetitive invocations of internalPathChanged()
with different arguments. The underlying idea was that this would
make it easier to have the handling of internal path changes
distributed over different objects. It caused however more problems
than it solved. The new behavior is now that it is invoked exactly
one time, and the argument is simply the new internal path.
Release 2.99.2 (May 29, 2009)
This release contains mostly build improvements, bug fixes, and API cleanups.
A) New classes:
- Http/Client
- Client is a utility class to bootstrap a new Wt
application.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- Ext::FormField
- Add setFocus() method.
- Ext::ToolBar
- Added an addStretch() method (contributed by David Galicia).
- Http::Response
- Added a continuation() method.
- WCheckBox
- Add support for tri-state checkboxes. These are also supported
by item models and WTreeView.
- WDialog
- Support for non-modal dialogs and interactive moving.
- WFormWidget
- New methods setReadOnly() and isReadOnly().
- WGridLayout
- Support a row stretch value of -1, which is like 0 but will still
manage the height of cells (allowing their contents to fill the entire
cell).
- WPaintDevice
- Support update rendering (not erasing the current canvas) using
paint flags.
C) API Changes:
- WFileUpload::isUploaded() was deprecated
- The name was not covering its actual behavior: instead of
checking whether a file has been uploaded, it returns whether true
when a call to upload() is not needed. You should replace any call
to isUploaded() with the new method
!canUpload() (note the inversion!.
Release 2.99.1 (Mar 20, 2009)
This release contains only build improvements, bug fixes, and API cleanups.
Release 2.99.0 (Mar 4, 2009)
This release is a preview for Wt 3.0.0. Many things have changed both
in the internals and the API. This is the first release that provides
several API changes which are not backward compatible (some of which
were post-poned until now).
Please read the following notes carefully, especially sections C) and
D), to understand what changes to expect and how to adapt existing
applications.
Support for the C++ boost library < 1.35 has been dropped: Wt now
requires at least boost >= 1.35.0.
A) New classes:
- WFlags
- WFlags is a utility class that provides a type-safe ORing of
enum flags. It is used everywhere in the Wt API where previously an
int was used to allow enums to be ORed together.
- WGoogleMap
- This is a widget, contributed by Richard Ulrich, that displays a
Google map.
- Http::Request, Http::Response, Http::ResponseContinuation and Http::UploadedFile
- These are utility classes which model an HTTP request and
response and that are used in the new WResource API.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- WApplication::enableUpdates()
- Server-initiated updates (aka "server push") has been
reimplemented and now works reliably in all situations, including in
the presence of intermediate proxies. The dependency on the 3rd
party JS orbited library has been removed and replaced with a simple
XHR-based solution.
- WButtonGroup
- Various methods were added: id's may be associated with a specific
radio buttons, which may be used to identify a particular button.
- WDatePicker
- Is now easier to use because of a sensible default constructor
that also creates the line edit using a WDateValidator,
and creates the icon which is associated with the popup.
- WFileResource
- Uses the continuation support in the new WResource API
to transmit the file in chunks.
- WLength
- WLength::Auto was added, is a synonym for WLength()
- WSuggestionPopup
- Is now also an MVC View widget, reading its data from a
WAbstractItemModel
- WTable
- New method
setHeaderCount() to specify the number of first rows or columns that
should be rendered as an HTML table header
(<th>).
- WWidget
New virtual method rerender() which allows a
widget to prepare itself before rendering (and defer internal
changes until that time). A widget may ask to be rerendered using
askRerender()
Widget no longer
inherits from WResource, but instead inherits directly from
WObject. It was simply a bad idea, and not useful for
anything.
C) Changes that break existing applications:
- 1) Signals are no longer public members
Instead, they are now accessor member functions:
e.g. WInteractWidget::clicked has been renamed to
WInteractWidget::clicked(). This has as major benefit
that signals can be created on-demand, which leads to drastically
lower memory usage and signifcant speedups especially on embedded
systems.
The change requires that everywhere in your code
where you access a signal, you will need to change to add
parentheses. For consistency, you may also want to
use the same convention for your own widget classes that define
signals.
- 2) WResource
The API has been redesigned and greatly simplified. If you are
implementing your own resources, then you will need to redesign your
implementation. The new API is simpler (requires only one virtual
method to be implemented) and more powerful, providing support for
continuations to serve large resources without blocking a
thread or requiring large memory usage.
In addition, resources have better thread-safety: they are now by
default reentrant (requests for a single resource may be handled
concurrently) and they are protected from concurrently being
destroyed by the main event loop.
- 3) WValidator
The signature for the virtual validate() method was
changed: parameter pos which was ignored anyway has
been removed.
- 4) WEnvironment
The methods getArgument() and
arguments() were renamed to respectively
getParameter() and getParameterMap(). The
signature for getParameter() is also different as it
returns a pointer to a string, which is 0 when the parameter is not
defined, instead of the olde behaviour of throwing an
exception. There is a new method that allows to read all values for
a parameter, getParameterValues()
- 5) WModelIndex
The 20-byte SHA1 hash based internal pointer has been removed
again as the object increase and overhead could not be justified.
D) Deprecated API that was removed:
These are API calls that were deprecated in earlier releases, and have now
been completely removed from the library:
- WApplication::applicationName()
- Use
WApplication::internalPath() instead.
- WApplication::setState()
- Use WApplication::setInternalPath()
instead.
- WApplication::state()
- Use
WApplication::internalPath() instead.
- WApplication::stateChanged
- Use WApplication::internalPathChanged()
instead.
- WRegExpValidator::WRegExpValidator(const boost::regex&)
- Use the WRegExpValidator(const
WString&) constructor instead.
- WPainterPath::drawArc(..., width, height, ...)
- An elliptical arc segment could not be support on all devices.
- WTable::numRows()
- Use WTable::rowCount().
- WTable::numColumns()
- Use WTable::columnCount()
instead.
- WText::setFormatting() and
WText::formatting()
- Use WText::setTextFormat() and
WText::textFormat() instead.
Release 2.2.3 (Jan 26, 2009)
This release is a maintenance release, with mostly bug fixes and
feature improvements.
A) Main new features in existing classes:
- WAbstractItemModel:
- const char * data in boost::any is now
also supported.
- WAbstractProxyModel:
- Implemented toRawIndex()
and fromRawIndex() so that indexes can be recovered
when the model's layout is changed, if the underlying model
provides implementations for toRawIndex()
and fromRawIndex().
- WComboBox:
- Also supports StyleClassRole data role for items
- WDialog:
- New method setTitleBarEnabled() to disable the default
title bar.
- WMenu:
- New method removeItem(), only works when rendered as a
list.
- WTabWidget:
- New method removeTab().
- WTreeView:
- New method setColumn1Fixed() to fix the first
column while scrolling horizontally through the other columns.
- New method setColumnFormat() to control formatting of
data.
- New method setColumnBorder() to set the
internal column border color.
- New method setColumnResizeEnabled() to disable resize
handles.
- The view now also reacts correctly to insertion and
removal of model columns.
B) New examples
-
gitmodel:
- An example that demonstrates how to implement a custom abstract
item model.
- treeview-dragdrop:
- An example that demonstrates drag and drop support in WTreeView.
C) Changes that break backward compatibility
- WApplication:
- useStyleSheet() only supports a subset of IE condition
strings, since the string is now parsed by Wt rather than by IE (when
dynamically loading stylesheets, the comment-syntax does not work
reliably).
Release 2.2.2 (Dec 1, 2008)
As of now, we will also be listing noteworthy new API features,
even if they are no concern for backwards compatibility.
A) New classes:
- WPopupMenu,
WPopupMenuItem:
- A popup menu, which you would typically use to present a
context menu.
- WAbstractProxyModel,
WSortFilterProxyModel:
- Proxy models, which present data from a source model in a
different way.
- WLoadingIndicator, WDefaultLoadingIndicator,
WOverlayLoadingIndicator:
- Customizable loading indicators.
B) Main new features in existing classes:
- WTreeView, WAbstractItemModel:
- The WAbstractItemModel interface was extended to allow handling
of drag & drop events, and WTreeView now is able to start
dragging and handle dropping of item selections and other data.
- JSignal:
- You can now pass the original (keyboard/mouse) JavaScript event
as a parameter to custom signals.
- WTreeView:
- access mouse event in itemClicked, doubleClicked and
mouseWentDown signals.
- WServer:
- Support for widget-set mode, allowing a Wt application to be
embedded in an existing web page/application.
C) Changes that break backward compatibility
This release does not contain changes that break existing
applications.
Release 2.2.1 (Nov 3, 2008)
This release is as usually a mix of bug fixes, improvements and new
features.
We have made a significant change to the MVC system, which will
break existing program code in case you have implemented your own
models (i.e. deriving from WAbstractItemModel) or views
widgets (i.e. components that listen to model changes).
The WAbstractItemModel interface was changed to support
hierarchical models. This means that most methods will now take an
extra parameter that specifies the parent WModelIndex,
and also all signals have now this extra parameter. Because the
parameter has a default value of WModelIndex() which corresponds to
the top level parent, the API is largely backwards compatible when
merely using the model. It is only those classes that reimplement the
interface, or listen to signal events, that are affected.
The immediate benefit of the new WAbstracItemModel
interface is that it allows us to implement View widgets like the new
WTreeView widget.
Release 2.2.0 (Sept 12, 2008)
This release has a rather substantial rewrite (and simplification)
of Wt's bootstrapping process. In the past, Wt used a frameset trick
to be able to load the AJAX-based skeleton when JavaScript was
available. Isntead, now, the entire AJAX-based stuff is loaded
directly into the bootstrap page. A benefit of the new approach is
that we avoid iframe tricks, which have been deprecated from strict
HTML and XHTML. But, it was in fact motivated in the first place to
support all major browsers for a new internal path API. This new API
allows to fully support URL changes and bookmarks in a unified way
(i.e. it works equally when the browser supports AJAX, no JavaScript,
or is a bot such as google bot).
As a consequence, this release contains the following changes that
may break your application:
- WMenu::enableBrowserHistory() and WMenu::browserHistoryId() have been removed, use the new methods WMenu::setInternalPathEnabled() and WMenu::setInternalBasePath()
- WMenuItem has been reorganized, and if you have
specialized WMenuItem you will need to adapt your reimplementation
to the new virtual interface. In the new interface, you need to
reimplement WMenuItem::createItemWidget() and
WMenuItem::updateItemWidget() allowing you to react to
item changes (internal path or text). The default implementation now
always uses a WAnchor.
- WApplication::setState(), WApplication::state() and WApplication::stateChanged have been deprecated. It is stronly advised that you use the new internal path API instead. This does require you to treat different parts of the state as a file hierarchy. See the WApplication::setInternalPath() documentation.
The following methods have been deprecated (but are still supported):
- WTable::numRows() has been renamed
to WTable::rowCount().
- WTable::numColumns() has been renamed
to WTable::columnCount().
Release 2.1.5 (July 25, 2008)
Wt now installs its include files in a Wt/ subdirectory. You may
want to change your build files to pick up this new include directory,
or, change your code to scope the include files to look like
#include<Wt/WLineEdit> instead of #include<WLineEdit>
This release contains the following changes that may break your
application:
- WText will validate XHTML text when it is set to the
widget. The old behaviour was to validate only before
rendering. The change was needed to be able to react to XML parse
errors. As a consequence if you are creating a WText with text that
is not valid XML, followed by a
call setFormatting(WText::PlainFormatting), you should
change this now to use the new WText constructor which
takes the TextFormat as a new argument: new WText(text,
Wt::PlainText, parentWidget)
- WContainerWidget::setLayout(WLayout *layout, bool fitWidth, bool
fitHeight) has been replaced with the more generic
WContainerWidget::setLayout(WLayout *layout, int
alignment).
The following methods and enumerations have been deprecated (but are
still supported):
- enum WText::Formatting has been renamed
to Wt::TextFormat. The old values map as follows on new
values:
- WText::XHTMLFormatting becomes Wt::XHTMLText;
- WText::XHTMLUnsafeFormatting becomes Wt::XHTMLUnsafeText
- WText::PlainFormatting becomes Wt::PlainText
- WText::setFormatting() has been renamed
to WText::setTextFormat() and
WText::formatting() has been renamed
to WText::textFormat().
Release 2.1.4 (July 4, 2008)
The following has changed for building Wt:
- The CMake variable CONFIGURATION (which defaulted to
/etc/wt/wt_config.xml) is no longer used, but instead there is now a
CONFIGDIR (/etc/wt/) which is used to store configuration
files.
The following has changed in the wt_config.xml file:
- The <valgrind-path> setting for the FCGI connector may now
be a command-line including arguments
This release should not contain changes that may break your
application.
Release 2.1.3 (May 20, 2008)
This release should not contain changes that may break your
application.
Release 2.1.2 (April 14, 2008)
The following changes may break your application build:
- WTreeNode::expanded() has been renamed
to WTreeNode::isExpanded().
Release 2.1.1 (April 10, 2008)
This release should not break any of your applications, but we did
deprecate some methods and enumeration types. You are advised to
migrate to the replacements methods since we will discontinue support
for the older ones in the future.
The following methods and enumerations have been deprecated:
- enum SelectionUnit has been renamed
to SelectionBehavior. The old values map as follows on new
values: CellSelection becomes SelectItems;
RowSelection becomes SelectRows.
- WWidget::setOffset(int sides, WLength) is deprecated,
and the new method is WWidget::setOffsets(WLength, int
sides): the argument order has been switched to be consistent
with the method signature of setMargin()
and setPadding().
- WResource::suggestFilename() has been renamed to
WResource::suggestFileName().
The following changes affect run-time behaviour:
- WTreeNode now supports a policy for when to show a child count
indication. The old behaviour was to always show the child count.
Now, by default this option is disabled. Use
WTreeNode::setChildCountPolicy(Enabled) to get the old
behaviour back, if you wish.
Release 2.1.0
The library dependencies have changed slightly.
To build Wt 2.1.0, you need:
- CMake 2.4 or later
- boost 1.34.1 (boost 1.33.1 might should still work, but is
not recommended)
- asio 0.3.9: either the boost or non-boost version (only
for the http connector)
- optionally, openssl for HTTPS support (only for the http
connector)
- optionally, libz for gzip compression support (only for
the http connector)
- fcgi library, including C++ bindings (libfcgi++)(only for the
fcgi connector)
Furthermore, the Wt::Ext library has been upgraded and now wraps
around the extjs 2.x library, instead of extjs 1.x.
Some API changes may need a porting effort:
- Ext::ProgressDialog: doesn't show by default, you
need to call show() to show the dialog.
- Ext::ContentPanel, Ext::BorderLayout have
been removed. They have been replaced with a stand-alone layout
system, that may manage contents in
an Ext::Container. The layout system provides
WBorderLayout and several other layout managers.
- WSignalMapper has been expanded to allow mapping of
signals with an extra argument, which is passed to the mapped
signal. Because of this, the signature of the class has been
expanded with an extra template argument. If you have forward
declarations to WSignalMapper, you will need to modify
these too (or simply include WSignalMapper).
- WAnchor: no longer uses a WLabel internally,
and the label-releated methods have been removed.
Release 2.0.5
- WDialog (and WMessageBox) usage changed, and
is now more like Qt. When you are not
using WDialog::exec() or WMessageBox::show(...),
then you must explictly show() the dialog to show it. You
can now also hide() the dialog if you want.
-
Moved several enums from within classes to the Wt namespace. This is
likely to break your code at compile time when you are using one. The
fix is to remove the class scope from the enum type or value.
- WScrollArea::Orientation -> Wt::Orientation
- WMenu::Orientation -> Wt::Orientation
- WMessageBox::StandardButton -> Wt::StandardButton
- WMessageBox::Icon -> Wt::Icon
Release 2.0.4
Important: 2.0.4a contains a fix for a bug introduced in 2.0.4 that
reset the deploy-path in wthttpd.
This release adds a few new features:
- WComboBox (and WSelectionBox) now use
a WAbstractItemModel in a more flexible model/view
system.
- Stylesheets may be browser-conditional (by Patrick Fischer)
- wthttpd may serve custom error pages (by Patrick Fischer)
- WResource can now access HTTP GET or POST query
arguments. This will break your code (at compile time) if you
have implemented your own WResource, since the signature of the
streamResourceData() method has been changed to pass
the arguments map as a second parameter.
Release 2.0.1
This release fixes some build-related problems, as well as smaller
bugs. The main improvement in this release is related to use of Wt
in resource-constrained embedded systems.
The most visible change is that the dependency on the Xerces C++ XML
library was dropped in favour of the much smaller Mini-XML
library. The draw-back is a reduction of supported character
encodings to only UTF8 and UTF16, next to the default locale character
encoding (which is typically an 8-bit flavour).
When using the built-in httpd, you can now disable support for SSL
at compile time, freeing a number of SSL-related dependencies.
In the API, more comparison operators (== and !=) were added to
WString, and a WViewWidget was added for simple MVC widgets (with
the main purpose to reduce session-state at the server).
Release 2.0.0
This release contains numerous changes which are likely to cause some
porting effort for Wt 1.1.x applications to work properly.
If you are upgrading from a 1.99.x release, you will notice that
some of these notes have actually evolved, especially with respect to
WString and unicode support.
Here is a list of changes with respect to Wt 1.1.x that are likely
to require your attention, and some tips on how to do the porting.
1) Namespace Wt
All Wt classes are now inside the namespace Wt.
To handle this change, you will need to:
- Wrap forward declarations to Wt widgets in header files inside a
Wt namespace, or #include <WFwdDeclarations>
- and scope all Wt classes with Wt::,
- or import the Wt namespace: using namespace Wt;
2) WString
Previously, most widgets offered double methods that either used a
std::string for literal text, or a
WMessage for localized text.
In the new release, widgets use Wt::WString for both
literal and localized text. WString offers unicode support for both
literal as well as localized text. To create a literal string,
simply assign or construct a Wt::WString from that string. The
strings supported or both narrow and wide C and C++ strings. UTF8
encoded narrow strings may also be converted. To create a localized
string, use one of the static methods WString::tr(const
std::string key) and WWidget::tr(const std::string
key).
To help with legacy code, WMessage is now a typedef for WString, but
is deprecated and should not be used in new code. Unfortunately, the
constructors WMessage(const char *text) and
WMessage(const std::string text), changed meaning!
While previously they took a key to construct a localized message,
they now take a literal text (the exact opposite!), since they are
in fact plain WString() constructors. As a consequence your application
will display key values instead of resolving those values (but will
not break entirely).
The new approach offers the benefit of only requiring one method
signature for both literal and localizable text. This not only
simplifies our work, but more importantly by using
WString for displayed text in the API of your own
widgets, localization (including the automatic language switching)
comes automatically and is decided on by the user of your widget.
Fortunately, there is a straightforward trick to handle most consequences
of this change:
- Replace WMessage(...) with tr(...),
- add .value() when using the result of functions such
as WText::text(),
- change your own classes to use WString
wherever they expect some text that will be displayed, instead of
std::string or WMessage.
3) Wide string API
Since Wt 2.0.0, the API for Wt has been changed to use WString
instead of C++ narrow strings. WString supports both narrow and wide
strings, and provides conversion between both. It does not provide
string operations, however, and instead acts as a string
container. You should convert to a C++ string type to perform
operations. You should also not use WString outside of the user
interface part of your application.
4) No more wmain()
Previously, the Wt library implemented the main(int argc, char
**argv) function, and called a wmain() function
which created the WApplication instance.
Wt 2.0.0 allows multiple applications to run within a single process.
Therefore, the WApplication::exec() approach was no longer
feasible. The new approach requires that:
- your main function should look like this:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
return Wt::WRun(argc, argv, &createApplication);
}
- where createApplication is a function of the following
signature:
Wt::WApplication *createApplication(const Wt::WEnvironment& env)
{
// return a new application object.
}
5) Configuration in /etc/wt/wt_config.xml
Wt 2.0.0 uses a configuration file for a number of settings that
could previously be configured at build time of the library, or
in the API. The latter functions are:
- WApplication::setMaximumRquestSize()
- WApplication::setIdleTimeout()
6) Removed obsolete classes
Wt 2.0.0 removed a number of classes that were still in the widget
tree, but have been obsoleted by more flexible classes:
- WAbstractTab, WButtonTab, and WTabWidget are obsoleted by the more flexible WMenu.
7) Deprecate boost::regex from WRegExpValidator API
The constructor and methods that takes a boost::regex object in
the WRegExpValidator API have been deprecated, to remove the dependency
on boost from the public API. You should consider the std::string based
construtor and method instead.
8) WObject::emit() has been removed.
Since Wt 1.99.1, we have removed WObject::emit() function. Instead,
you may simply call the signal with its arguments, or use the
explicit emit method (recommended).
To adapt your code, you should:
- Replace all emit(MySignal(...)) with MySignal(...) or MySignal.emit(...)
9) WResource::streamResourceData() signature has changed.
Since Wt 2.0.0, WResource::streamResourceData() returns a boolean value
which indicates if all data has been streamed. If you have reimplemented
WResource for your applications, you must update the signature and return
true.
The change is relevant only within the new server-push support that is
now in Wt 2.0.0. This allows you to continuously append to the content
of a resource.
10) Rename of WJavascriptSlot to JSlot.
Release 1.1.7
This release contains lots of additions and improvements, but should
be completely backwards-compatible.
Release 1.1.6
There is one change which will impact the behaviour of current applications:
Currently, on exit, by default the last widget updates are shown. So, no
more good-bye message. This changes slightly when one needs to redirect()
to a new location: not when WApplication::exec() returns, but during the
same event handling as when calling WApplication::quit().
Release 1.1.5
Nothing special...
Release 1.1.4
Changes to impact everybody, since the previous release:
-
The dependency for libxml++ (and its large number of dependencies) has
been dropped, and replaced by Xerces-C++ (which has no further dependencies).
-
Wt programs need to link against libwtfcgi.so, instead of libwt.so. In the
future Wt will also support different web-connnector systems besides
FastCGI.
-
The signatures of wmain() and WApplication constructor have changed:
new signatures are:
- int wmain(const WEnvironment& env)
- WApplication::WApplication(const WEnvironment& env)
Other changes:
- Support for unicode is implemented, but perhaps needs more testing
by non-Western people ? Only UTF-8 is supported currently.
- Addition of a WTimer class -- see mission example.
- Many bug fixes which should make Wt more robust against illegal CGI
requests (which are ignored), and now Wt should exit cleanly in more
(all?) circumstances.
- Addition of feed-back for pending AJAX requests (does not work yet on
IE).
- Support for style sheets is improved: now inline decoration styles
will override style sheet styles. See hangman or treelist examples.
- The browser can be redirected to a new page. This is useful when the
application is terminated -- or to change during the application from
HTTP to HTTPS and back.
- WValidationStatus API has changed -- less complicated now.