Cloud Connected

Thoughts and Ideas from the Gitana Development Team



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Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver Release 1.0.3 is out!

Jul 4

The Cloud CMS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.0.3 of the Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver for jQuery, Dojo, Javascript/HTML5 and Node.js applications.

Download today from http://github.com/gitana/gitana-javascript-driver.

JavaScript Driver for Cloud CMS

The Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver is a JS library that you can drop into your HTML5/JS applications to take advantage of the authoring and delivery APIs of the Cloud CMS server. It makes it easier for developers to utilize the Cloud CMS HTTP/REST APIs by providing native convenience functions via JavaScript.

The Gitana JavaScript Driver is ideal for use within either the browser or server-side JS environments (like Node.js). For a Node.js wrapped module, please check out: http://github.com/gitana/gitana-node-js.

What is Cloud CMS?

Cloud CMS is a cloud platform as a service for managing all of your business content - from formal business content like articles and news items to social content and interaction data coming from your applications. Cloud CMS puts all of your data into an innovative, high performance and scalable repository and gives your business powerful tools for collaboration, branching, merging and working with content with a secure and robust tools.

To learn more about Cloud CMS, please visit: http://www.cloudcms.com

Release Highlights

This release includes a number of highlights, including bug fixes and new features, which are worth mentioning. A few of the more important elements are shown below. For an itemized list of code level changes, please check the commit history.

  • Fix to map .each() iteration with nested property changes
  • Improved support for automatic application stack and data store caching
  • Preference for clientKey syntax (instead of clientId) (so as to be consistent with adjustments to Cloud CMS)
  • Support for application deployments, query and lookup via API
  • Fixes for missing clone() methods for proper type adherence on promise chaining
  • Improved ability to find stacks for contained data store elements
  • Added ability to specify parent and file paths on node creation and lookup
  • Enhancements to ticket based authentication
  • Support for HTML5 local and session based storage of OAuth2 credentials
  • Improved support for non-window (server-side) environments (like Node.js)
  • Better handling of OAuth2 credentials using refresh token
  • Support for Preview URIs (new feature in Cloud CMS)
  • Support for Identity Policies (new feature in Cloud CMS)
  • Support for partial tree loading (new feature in Cloud CMS)
  • Fix for miscalculated Application URIs

We encourage our community to upgrade to this new release of the Cloud CMS JavaScript driver. We encourage everyone to submit issues, pull requests or post questions to our forums at http://www.cloudcms.org.

To learn more about the Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver, please visit our open-source GitHub repository at http://github.com/gitana/gitana-javascript-driver.

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Building Applications with Ratchet JS MVC

Jul 7

Over the past few days, I’ve had a chance to delve back into ratchet.js which is a JavaScript MVC framework that I had a hand in building in 2010. By this point, there are a lot of JavaScript MVC frameworks that you can utilize. However, at the time we built it, we were very inspired by sammy.js, backbone.js and knockout.js.

A few points on these libraries:

  • I particularly liked sammy.js for its simplicity. The developers of that library do a great job minimizing the work and also utilized an interesting “chaining” approach during the rendering phase which was inspirational. We really liked the chaining approach and used it in Ratchet as well as our own Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver.
  • Both backbone.js and knockout.js are fantastic frameworks for defining scoped-observable variables in the model. They solve things like how to update content on the page in real-time, build components that listen for update events and pass messages between controls or elements on the site.

We sought to produce an MVC library that gave us the singular foundation that we needed to build really great HTML5 and JavaScript-based applications. Furthermore, we wanted a framework that would be ideal for real-time, cloud-connected applications. Thus, while it’s important to get the foundation bits right in terms of observables, components, templates, routes and so forth, we also felt it was very important to define an asynchronous rendering pipeline that could manage state for the backend, stream content forward and aggregate it into HTML5.

None of that is really too outlandish. A few years ago, for those old enough to recall (not that it was that long ago), everyone was crazy about mashups. The basic idea behind mashups was that content would be sourced from other locations and presented singularly. That idea hasn’t gone away and with the explosion of cloud-based services including Cloud CMS for all of your content and application services, we think its high time that a JS framework was built to address that need.

So that’s where we’re headed going forward. I find it an absolute joy to work with ratchet.js and would recommend to readers that they take a look. It’s a purely open-source project under the Apache 2 license. All of the source code is available on GitHub.

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