Wt 3.1.8, JWt 3.1.8

The highlights of this release are:

This release contains support for Cross Origin resource sharing, which we blogged about and is used to display the chat widget (served by a different application) inside the homepage. CORS is what makes Wt’s WidgetSet mode useful, and, works equally well for Ajax and WebSockets connections.

Many web applications require some sort of PDF report generation based on XHTML input. This could be the case when a user provides XHTML text using a WTextEdit rich text editor. We added a rendering utility class, supporting a subset of HTML and CSS, for generating single- and multi-page PDF files. We believe we have implemented the hardest parts of HTML/CSS layout (tables, floats, …), and if needed and useful, this class could be easily extended to interpret more of HTML and CSS.

This feature was sponsored by Eurofer.

We added an API method to indicate that the UI should be layed out Right-to-Left. While HTML has some support for this through the "direction" property, this still required some work as not all properties of CSS are mirrored (now that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?). As this is mostly for Middle-Eastern languages, we welcome some feed-back from users there to understand what is still lacking (and what is good).

While tracking a nasty load problem seen on IE8 browsers, we modified the way the default bootstrap works. As a side effect, stylesheets are now loaded before the UI is rendered (as with the progressive bootstrap mode), and load time has improved too.