Apache Click 2.3.0 Release Candidate 1  is available for download. v2.3.0 contains important new features including Ajax support, Page Actions and light-weight stateful controls. In addition there are new documentation, examples and a slew other enhancements.

New features and improvement:

  • Ajax support.
  • Page Action support.
  • Stateful Controls.
  • Improve fields to only be processed if they have an incoming request
    parameter. This improvement streamlines dynamic forms
    since fields added at runtime during s POST request won't
    bind their values and won't be validated for that
    request. In subsequent requests the Field will have an
    incoming parameter and so will have it's value bound and
    validated. Another advantage is that dynamically added Fields won't
    have their default value overridden in the POST request they
    were added in. This issue has been raised by Nirmal
    Solanki [CLK-722].
  • Added automapping support for GAE with a caveat that page templates must be placed under the folders page or pages. This issue was raised by Ke Sun [CLK-639].
  • Added MessagesMapService interface to support pluggable messages map implementations [CLK-655].
  • Improved MessagesMap to be extendable and customizable [CLK-728].
  • Added support for loading DateField translations for month and day names from the JDK. [CLK-650].
  • Added support for Menus that do not have roles defined. If no roles are defined, IsUserInRoles passes a null argument to hasAccess to determine whether access is permitted to menus without roles [CLK-724].
  •  Added support for absolute page classnames when configuring pages in click.xml. Absolute classnames aids with IDE hot-linking and is less confusing to use. [CLK-704]. 
  • Fixed escaping of control values and attributes to be XML friendly
    in order to support Ajax requests. Previously all HTML
    characters was escaped, now only the following characters
    are escaped: <, >, ", ', & [CLK-674]. 

New documentation:

New examples:

Removed:

  • Removed the ability to automatically bypass validation
    for Forms through JavaScript. This ability was added in
    2.2.0 but raised concerns over security and was dropped for
    2.3.0. If you used this feature in existing applications,
    please see the Upgrade path for a safe alternative to bypass validation. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Deprecated:

  • Deprecated stateful page support: Page.setStateful().
  • Stateful pages had the following issues:
    • Stateful pages was introduced to make it easier to
      store page state across multiple HTTP requests. However
      developing a stateful page is very different from developing
      a stateless one and this lead to Click applications that are
      inconsistent and harder to maintain.
    • In addition stateful page support has never been
      implemented consistently across the framework and some
      components did not work correctly.
    • Stateful pages are very coarse grained, making it
      difficult to control which objects are stored in the
      session.
    • Stateful pages have also introduced unnecessary
      complexity in the framework itself, which can now be phased
      out.

    Unfortunately there is no direct upgrade path from a stateful page.
    However the majority of use cases are catered for by the new
    stateful support in the controls: Table, Form, TabbedPanel,
    Field and AbstractLink.

The Apache Click team