As you know, the version 0.95 is almost becoming legendary for not being released. I've had quite a lot of requests and questions about it lately, and thought I'd give this little update here.

What's going on?

Well, not too much, as my time and efforts are drenched these days. There is a beta of 0.95 sleeping here on my harddrive (and for those brave, brave people out there, I've chucked an unfinished beta version here for your pleasure, but it comes without any guarantee to solve any world problem!) still awaiting some polishing up and finishing. Time schedule? Why knows. Maybe within a month or so.

What's in store?

Quite a lot, which is why I jumped from 0.88 to 0.95 without any versions inbetween. One of the major things is of course the rewrite and refactoring of most code, and in that I've made everything configurable through nice little XML configuration files. Now you can do things quite the way you like it.

And?

And, it it isn't backwards compatible out of the box. But there is a nice document explaining a simple procedure of how to convert from pre-0.95 to the new system in a few simple steps. It isn't all that hard. The reason for the uncompatibility is of course that the file structures have been altered.

Why?

All the changes made are done for one important reason; flexibility. I know that spouting "flexibility" can be seen upon as cursing in a church, but let me explain. There are many good and clever bits in xSiteable; libraries to do notation translation, importing of complex XML or XTM data, dealing with Topic Maps, creating various menues and breadcrumbs, advanced CSS, and so forth, all done in XSLT. In the old days, you could only use this goodness from and through xSiteable itself. Now you can use bits of it in other applications.

Huh? Other applications?

A goal of mine is to create a CMS based on Topic Maps, and as much as 0.88 was a legacy CMS system, I wanted more. What I specifically wanted was a way to link xSiteable into an appropriate dynamic cache of sorts, so that it could be used as a backend CMS engine for a ASP/.NET/PHP/JSP framework. Now it can, and the famed old PHP administration application that came with 0.88 has been taken out.

What!? That was the cool part of the application?

I know, I know, but hold on. My time doesn't stretch far enough to maintain the PHP package. I din't have time to convert it into the 0.95 format. So I leave this as an exercise for other developers to do. Take the old admin package, and create versions of it for ASP/.NET/PHP/JSP or whatever you fancy. The new 0.95 structure makes this really, really simple and easy. (If, and only if, I find myself in massive amounts of time and boredness, I might convert the old PHP app, but I doubt it. Unless you all threaten me or something. Maybe.)

And there you have it. There are of course lot's of other things I'd like to say about this, but I'll leave that for a time closer to release. If anyone has any comments, leave them in this blog entry or mail me at [alex at shelter dot nu]. If you want to help out with any development of the system, like a administration app or something, do NOT hesitate! You know who you are, Asbjørn! :)

Permalink (Thu, 13 May 2004 16:00:00 GMT)| Comments (3)