Cloud Connected

Thoughts and Ideas from the Gitana Development Team



Alpaca 1.0.3 Released!

Jan 7

We’re pleased to announce the release of Alpaca Web Forms 1.0.3 for jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

Alpaca is an open-source project that provides an easy way to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a jQuery plugin and provides a nice abstraction so that you can change form layouts, validation logic and presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca provides the web forms capabilities for Cloud CMS - The Cloud Content Management Platform for the Enterprise.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and new features. These fixes and features are described more fully below.

Easier to Build

Alpaca 1.0.3 includes a new build structure that is lightweight and easier to work with. Everything is now fully-driven by Ant and all of the source files are completely intact without any build or compilation step. This mean that you can quickly test changes to core files by simply launching a web server and mounting the source.

AMD Modules

Alpaca 1.0.3 also includes optional support for AMD (Asynchronous Module Definitions). This makes Alpaca compatible with RequireJS, Curl and other AMD loaders.

Alpaca now features a wrapper around its code that detects the presence of an AMD environment. This is similar to how jQuery and others now do it. If AMD is available, Alpaca will define the “alpaca” module.

Cloud CMS hosts its AMD modules, including Alpaca, online here: https://github.com/cloudcms-components

What’s New

Alpaca 1.0.3 has a number of new features and fixes.

  1. Previewing of Form ahead of commit
  2. Arrays now support custom labels on Item move, add and remove
  3. Multi-select of array data
  4. Array name field now properly calculated
  5. Improvements to Mobile UI layout and rendering
  6. Improved JSON formatting via JSON editor
  7. WYSIWYG validation now properly fires
  8. Support for read-only arrays
  9. Easier programmatic access to buttons on rendered form
  10. Addition of DateTime field
  11. Improved support for EventListeners
  12. More Sample Code
  13. Sample Login Form
  14. Lazy Loading of Field Values
  15. Examples of Form Previews
  16. How to use DateTime Control


We encourage our community to check out Alpaca 1.0.3! You can download Alpaca by visiting our web site at http://www.alpacajs.org.

For code-level information on these bug fixes and new features, please visit our GitHub project at https://github.com/gitana/alpaca.