Click Framework

Apache Click v2.3.0 final now available

2011-03-27T04:10:00.000-07:00

Apache Click 2.3.0 final 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 of other enhancements.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.2.0 or earlier.
Download Click 2.3.0
Maven bundles
Live examples

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 multiple TabbedPanels on a page. To programmatically activate a specific TabbedPanel use the tabPanelIndex- request parameter, for example tabPanelIndex-myTabbedPanel [CLK-753].

New documentation:

Added a section covering the new Behavior support.
Added a chapter on Ajax, covering AjaxBehaviors, Ajax execution flow and a full example.
Added a section covering the new Page Action support.

New examples:

Added examples showcasing the new Ajax support. See the Ajax Menu for the full list of examples.
Added an example showing how to integrate a TabbedPanel, Form and Table.
Added an example showing a Stateful TabbedPanel.
Added an example FieldSeparator Control and example usage page [CLK-544].

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

Apache Click v2.3.0 Release Candidate 1 now available

2011-01-24T02:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.2.0 or earlier.
Download Click 2.3.0-RC1
Maven bundles
Live examples

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:

Added a section covering the new Behavior support.
Added a chapter on Ajax, covering AjaxBehaviors, Ajax execution flow and a full example.
Added a section covering the new Page Action support.

New examples:

Added examples showcasing the new Ajax support. See the Ajax Menu for the full list of examples.
Added an example showing how to integrate a TabbedPanel, Form and Table.
Added an example showing a Stateful TabbedPanel.
Added an example FieldSeparator Control and example usage page [CLK-544].

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

Apache Click v2.3.0 Milestone 1 now available

2010-11-28T16:49:00.000-08:00

Click 2.3.0 Milestone 1 is available for download. This milestone contains important new features including Ajax support, Page Actions and light-weight stateful controls. In addition there are new documentation, examples and other minor enhancements.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.2.0 or earlier.
Download Click 2.3.0-M1
Maven bundles
Live examples

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:

Added a section covering the new Behavior support.
Added a chapter on Ajax, covering AjaxBehaviors, Ajax execution flow and a full example.
Added a section covering the new Page Action support.

New examples:

Added examples showcasing the new Ajax support. See the Ajax Menu for the full list of examples.
Added an example showing how to integrate a TabbedPanel, Form and Table.
Added an example showing a Stateful TabbedPanel.
Added an example FieldSeparator Control and example usage page [CLK-544].

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

Apache Click 2.2.0: Dynamic Form Validation

2010-09-14T04:02:00.000-07:00

In this three part series I'll blog about some of the new features added in 2.2.0, namely:

In this third and final installment I'll cover conditional form validation. This feature simplifies dynamic Form behavior by allowing developers to control when form validation should be applied. Generally form validation should be applied when the user submits the completed form. However when working with dynamic forms, the form is often submitted (using JavaScript) to the server in an incomplete state in order to add dynamic Fields and components. I'll refer to this as "incomplete submissions" because the form was not completely filled out by the user when the submission occurs.

Ideally form validation should not be applied to incomplete submissions as the user will be presented any validation errors that occurred. Seeing the errors will be unexpected for the user since they are still busy filling out the form and did not intend to perform a submission.

Let's look at a simple example. Below we have a page with a required name field and a checkbox that indicates whether the user is married or not. If the married checkbox is checked, a field is displayed for capturing the spouse's name. The spouse's name field is also required.

public class ValidationDemo extends BorderPage {

    Form form = new Form("form");

    // The submit button is used to submit the completed form. Note, do not
    // name the Submit button "submit". That will cause a JavaScript error when
// the button is clicked.
    Submit ok = new Submit("ok");

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();
        form.add(new TextField("fullName", true));
        addControl(form);
        Checkbox married = new Checkbox("married", "Married?");

        // We use JavaScrcipt to submit the "incomplete" form when the user
        // clicks the checkbox.
        married.setAttribute("onclick", "form.submit();");
        form.add(married);

        form.add(ok);

        // Explicitly bind the checkbox
        ClickUtils.bind(married);
        if (married.isChecked()) {
            form.add(new TextField("spouseName", true));
        }
    }
}

Note the highlighted line above. We are using JavaScript to submit the form when the married checkbox is checked.

Here is a screenshot of the page:

When the checkbox is checked, the form is submitted and the spouse field is added. Next the form is validated and the required name and spouse error messages is displayed, as seen in the screenshot below:

We don't want to show the validation messages yet. Particularly problematic is the error message for the Spouse Name field since the user has not seen this field until now.

One solution is to clear the error messages if the form was submitted but the "ok" Submit button was not clicked, meaning the form was submitted through some other means ie. JavaScript. We can add this logic to the onPost page event:

...

@Override
public void onPost() {
    // Clear form errors if the "ok" submit button was not clicked
    if (!ok.isClicked()) {
        form.clearErrors();
    }
}

This produces the screenshot below:

This looks better. The Spouse Name has been added and no error messages are shown.

However this solution is not ideal because the validation step is still performed and we have to manually clear the errors. So is there a better way?

Indeed there is. By leveraging Explicit binding, one can conditionally switch off form and field validation as follows:

if(!submit.isClicked()) { 
    form.setValidate(false); 
}

Let's revisit our earlier example and update it to use conditional validation:

public class ValidationDemo extends BorderPage {

    Form form = new Form("form");

    // The submit button is used to submit the completed form. Note, do not
    // name the Submit button "submit". That will cause a JavaScript error when
// the button is clicked.
    Submit ok = new Submit("ok");

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();
        form.add(new TextField("fullName", true));
        addControl(form);
        Checkbox married = new Checkbox("married", "Married?");

        // We use JavaScript to submit the "incomplete" form when the user
        // clicks the checkbox.
        married.setAttribute("onclick", "form.submit();");
        form.add(married);

        form.add(ok);

        // Bind the submit button. If it wasn't clicked it means the Form was
        // submitted using JavaScript and we don't want to validate yet
        ClickUtils.bind(submit);

        // If the Form was submitted but the submit was not clicked, don't validate
        if(form.isFormSubmission() && !submit.isClicked()) {
            form.setValidate(false);
        }

        if (married.isChecked()) {
            form.add(new TextField("spouseName", true));
        }
    }
}

The screenshot below shows the form after checking the checkbox:

As you can see, no errors are displayed since the form was not validated.

Conditional form validation together with explicit binding provides a good combination for adding dynamic behavior to your Click pages and forms.

This concludes the three part series covering the new features of Click 2.2.0.

Apache Click 2.2.0: Explicit Binding

2010-09-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

In this three part series I'll blog about some of the new features added in 2.2.0, namely:

In this second installment I'll cover explicit binding which allows developers to bind, or set, a control's value to incoming request parameters. Not all controls support binding though. The most common bindable controls include Field, Form and Abstractlink. Explicit binding simplifies dynamic Page and Form behavior as it allows you to bind and query control values whenever you need to, for example in the onInit event or the Page constructor.

When talking about explicit binding it is also worth mentioning implicit binding.
Implicit binding occurs automatically every request as part of the onProcess event. So Control values will automatically be set once the onProcess event has occurred.Click Controls uses a convention of handling bind logic in a method called bindRequestValue().

A typical bindRequestValue() implementation looks like this:

public void bindRequestValue() {
    Context context = getContext();
    String controlName = getName();
    String value = context.getRequestParameter(controlName);
    if(value != null) {
        setValue(value);
    }
}

// For completeness sake we show the onProcess implementation as well.
// onProcess delegates the binding logic to bindRequestValue
public void onProcess() {
    bindRequestValue();
    ...
}

Generally the control name is used to lookup the incoming request parameter, but
other conventions can be used as well.

Under most circumstances, implicit binding is all you need. But sometimes you might want to know the value of a control before the onProcess event occurs. For example, within the onInit()
event, you might want to check which drop-down value a user selected in order to
add another Field to the Form. Remember, only Controls that are created and
attached to their parent page/container partakes in the onProcess event. That's why it's important to create and attach Controls to their parents prior to the onProcess event.

As you probably know already, the onInit event occurs before onProcess, and because implicit binding only occurs during onProcess, the Control value is not available for querying from onInit.

So how can you find out the value of a Control during the onInit event? This is
where explicit binding comes into play. Explicit binding allows developers to
dictate when the Control value is bound. So how can one explicitly bind the Control value?
By invoking the Control method, bindRequestValue(). (Recall that not all Controls
support binding and might not provide a bindRequestValue() method.)

There are a couple of caveats to be aware of when invoking bindRequestValue
directly.

Fields should only be bound if their parent Form has been submitted, otherwise if you have multiple forms on the page, you might end up in a situation where form1 fields could be bound to form2 fields.
Forwarded requests have already been processed and should not be used for binding purposes.

To make things easier, Click provides a couple of helper methods that takes care
of the caveats mentioned above. These helper methods are available from the
ClickUtils class which sports a variety of bind() and bindAndValidate() methods.
You can even pass in Containers such as Form to these methods and all child
controls will be bound.

The bindAndValidate() method will both bind and validate a Field or Form.

It's worth mentioning that it's also possible to lookup request parameters directly through the Context object instead of having to bind the control value.

Let's look at some examples next.

In this first example we will look at a dynamic Form where a Checkbox determines
whether a TextField should be added to the Form or not.

public class DynamicFormDemo extends Page {

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();
        Form form = new Form("form");
        addControl(form);
        Checkbox chk = new Checkbox("chk");
        form.add(chk);

        Submit ok = new Submit("ok");
        form.add(ok);

        // Explicitly bind the checkbox in the onInit event which allows us to query
        // whether the Checkbox was checked or not.
        ClickUtils.bind(chk);
        if(chk.isChecked()) {
            form.add(new TextField("name"));
        }
    }
}

We use the ClickUtils.bind() method to explicitly bind the Checkbox value so we
can query whether it is checked or not.

In this second example we expand the first by adding a Select field as well.

public class DynamicFormDemo extends Page {

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();
        Form form = new Form("form");
        addControl(form);
        Checkbox chk = new Checkbox("chk");
        form.add(chk);
        Select countries = new CountrySelect("countries");
        countries.getOptionList().add(Option.EMPTY_OPTION);
        form.add(countries);

        Submit ok = new Submit("ok");
        form.add(ok);

        // Explicitly bind the Form (and all it's child controls) in the onInit
        // event, allowing us to query whether he user checked the Checkbox and
        // which country was selected.
        ClickUtils.bind(form);
        if (chk.isChecked()) {
            form.add(new TextField("name"));
        }

        if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(countries.getValue())) {
            form.add(new TextField("location"));
        }
    }
}

Note, instead of binding the Checkbox and Select separately we pass the Form to
the ClickUtils.bind() method. When passing a container such as a Form to the
ClickUtils.bind() methods, all bindable controls in the container will have their
values bound. This provides an easy shortcut to quickly bind multiple controls.

In this third and final example we show how to both bind and validate a form.

public class DynamicFormDemo extends BorderPage {

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();
        Form form = new Form("form");
        addControl(form);
        Checkbox chk = new Checkbox("chk");
        form.add(chk);
        Select countries = new CountrySelect("countries", true);
        countries.getOptionList().add(Option.EMPTY_OPTION);
        form.add(countries);

        Submit ok = new Submit("ok");
        form.add(ok);

        // Explicitly bind and check that the Form (and all it's child
        // controls) is valid in the onInit event, allowing us to safely
        // query whether he user checked the Checkbox and
        // which country was selected.
        if (ClickUtils.bindAndValidate(form)) {
            if (chk.isChecked()) {
                form.add(new TextField("name"));
            }

            // The form validation passed and since the countries field is required
            // we can safely assume that a valid country has been selected
            form.add(new TextField("location"));
        }
    }
}

The ClickUtils.bindAndValidate() methods will bind and validate the field/s and return true if the field/s are valid, false otherwise.

ClickIDE 2.2.0.0 has been released!

2010-09-10T02:17:00.000-07:00

ClickIDE 2.2.0.0 is now available! ClickIDE is an Eclipse plug-in for the developing Click web applications.

This version supports Apache Click 2.2.0 and fixes some minor issues.

For details about ClickIDE see:
http://click.apache.org/docs/click-ide.html

Download is available here:
http://click.apache.org/docs/click-ide-downloads.html

Enjoy Click

SD Times interview with Apache Click vice president

2010-07-24T07:47:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Edgar, Apache Click Vice President, recently had a chat with SD Times editor in chief, David Rubinstein. Great to see Click getting some much deserved exposure.

Full interview can be viewed here.

Apache Click 2.2.0: DataProvider

2010-07-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

In this three part series I'll blog about some of the new features added in 2.2.0, namely:

In this first installment I'll cover DataProviders and how they simplify Click Page implementations.

To understand the benefits of DataProviders, we need to look at the problem they are trying to solve. To start off with let's do a quick recap of the major life cycle events of a Click Page. Below we list the events in the order they are executed:

<<init>>: page is created
onInit: page controls are created and added to the page
onProcess: control values are bound to request parameters, control values are validated and action listeners are fired
onRender: database intensive operations are performed here

Click allows certain events to be skipped depending on the outcome of a previous event. onRender for example, will be skipped if a Control action returns false. This together with the fact that onRender is the last event exposed by Click makes onRender ideal for database intensive operations. If a control action listener decides to redirect to a different page, it can return false to bypass the slow onRender method.

For example:

public class CustomerPage extends BorderPage {

    private Table table = new Table("table");
    private ActionLink editLink = new EditLink("edit");

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();

        table.add(new Column("firstname"));

        ...

        editLink.setActionListener(new ActionListener() {
            public boolean onAction(Control source) {
                Map params = Collections.singletonMap("id", editLink.getValue());

               // Redirect to edit customer page and pass the selected customer ID
               setRedirect(EditCustomerPage.class, params);
               return false;
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public void onRender() {
        // Database intensive operation: retrieving all customers from the database
        List<Customer> customers = getCustomerService.getCustomers();
        table.setRows(customers);
    }
}

In the example above you can see that we don't want to hit the database and retrieve all the customers only to be redirected to another page that does not render the customers we retrieved. In other words, because the customers won't be rendered by the page we redirect to, we don't want to pay for the database hit. Since the onRender event is skipped if an action listener returns false, it makes sense to place database intensive code there.

Inconsistent

Unfortunately this pattern cannot be applied to all controls. Some controls need their values populated before the onProcess event, either for validation or parameter binding purposes. For example, the Select control validation depends on its values to determines whether or not a valid selection was made. FormTable needs to have it's rows set in order to update its entity values against incoming request parameters.

Having some of the controls populated in onInit and others in onRender is inconsistent and a common pitfall for new users as they have to figure out which controls should be populated in which event.

DataProvider

The solution used in Click was to add a DataProvider interface to enable on demand data loading. A DataProvider has a single method, "public List getData()", that the control can invoke when it needs it's data. For example, a Table will invoke getData when it is rendered, a Select will invoke getData when it is validated and a FormTable will invoke getData when it is processed.

DataProviders leads to a more consistent Page implementation where all control creation logic can be encapsulated in the onInit event or even the page constructor. For example:

public class CustomerPage extends BorderPage {

    private Table table = new Table("table");
    private Select select = new Select("markets");

    @Override
    public void onInit() {
        super.onInit();

        table.add(new Column("firstname"));

        ...

        table.setDataProvider(new DataProvider() {
            public List<Customer> getData() {
                return getCustomerService().getCustomers();
            }
        });

        select.setDataProvider(new DataProvider() {
            public List<Option> getData() {
                List options = new ArrayList();
                for (Market market : getMarketService().getMarkets()) {
                    options.add(new Option(market.getId(), market.getName());
                }
                return options;
            }
        });
    }
}

In the example above we use DataProviders for both the Table and Select control. The Table data is only retrieved when the Table is rendered, so in the event of a redirect, the database operation is skipped. The Page is now consistent as all control setup logic is placed inside the onInit event.

Is onRender still necessary?

Absolutely. While DataProviders allow control creation logic to be encapsulated within the onInit event, not all data needs to be represented with controls. The Page template (Velocity) for example can be used to render markup for the customers passed from the page. onRender could still be used to retrieve the customers and make it available to the template. For example:

public class CustomerPage extends BorderPage {

    public void onRender() {
        addModel("customers", getCustomerService().getCustomers());
    }
}

<table>
...

#foreach($customer in $customers)
  <tr>
    <td>
      $customer.name
    <td>
    <td>
      $customer.holdings
    <td>
  </tr>
#end
</table>

If an action listener returns false, onRender is skipped and the database operation won't be performed, which is exactly the behavior we want.

Hope this overview was helpful. In the next installment I'll cover Explicit binding and Dynamic Form Validation, which both simplifies dynamic form creation.

Apache Click v2.2.0 has been released

2010-05-15T06:06:00.001-07:00

Click 2.2.0 final is available for download. Major new features include DataProviders for on-demand data loading and a Page interceptor facility for implementing cross cutting concerns such as security and transaction handling. There are also improved support for dynamic forms and stateful pages.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.1.0 or earlier.
Download Click 2.2.0
Maven bundles
Live examples

New features and improvements:

Added DataProvider support for Table, Select, PickList and CheckList providing on demand loading of data. With DataProviders, users won't have to be concerned about which page event (onInit or onRender) to set the data on the control [CLK-640].
Added PagingDataProvider interface to support large paginated result sets for Tables [CLK-640].
Added a MenuFactory for creating and loading Menus from configuration files. All the static Menu methods have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
Added an option for MenuFactory to not statically cache menus. This allows developers to cache menus in different scopes such as HttpSession. [CLK-405].
Added i18n support for Menus loaded from menu.xml. The menu DTD now includes a new name attribute. By specifying a name attribute in menu.xml, the Menu will attempt to load its label and title from resource bundles [CLK-591].
Added a Page Interceptor facility that provides an extension point for code which can listen to key page events and also interrupt normal page processing flow. [CLK-598].
Added improved dynamic Form support. Forms can now optionally bypass validation for JavaScript based submissions using the new JavaScript function "Click.submit(formName, validate)" [CLK-638].
Added improved dynamic Page and Form behaviour through new helper methods that can bind and validate Forms and Fields before the onProcess page event e.g. in the Page constructor or "onInit" event. The new methods are:
- ClickUtils.bind(Field)
- ClickUtils.bind(Form)
- ClickUtils.bind(AbstractLink)
- ClickUtils.bindAndValidate(Field)
- ClickUtils.bindAndValidate(Form) [CLK-638]
Added improved disabled behavior through the following changes:
- Disabled fields are not processed or validated
- Disabled field values are not copied to domain objects
- Disabled fields are automatically enabled if the field has an incoming request parameter, indicating that the field was enabled on the client using JavaScript. Please note that this behavior does not apply to Checkbox or Radio fields. See the setDisabled() javadoc for details [CLK-646].
Added new method Container.replace for replacing an existing control with a new control. In previous releases, an exception would be raised if a page or container already contained a control with the same name as the newly added control. In 2.2.0 the replace method is automatically called when adding a control which name matches that of an existing control in the page or container. This behavior will likely only benefit stateful pages since stateless pages are recreated each request [CLK-666].
Added methods to Fields for styling their labels. See new methods Field.setLabelStyle(String) and Field.setLabelStyleClass(String). This issue was raised by Stefax [CLK-595].
Added methods to Fields for providing styling hints to their containing elements. See new methods Field.setParentStyleHint(String) and Field.setParentStyleClassHint(String). This issue was raised by Stefax [CLK-595].
Added trim property to Field for controlling if the Field request parameter is trimmed or not. See new method Field.setTrim(boolean). This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-627].
Added new Context methods Context.hasRequestParameter(String) and Context.hasRequestAttribute(String).
Added support to Select for a default option that can be used to validate non selection against and allows the Select to only populate its optionList at rendering time, instead of during onProcess event. [CLK-641].
Improved default autobinding mode to bind both public fields and fields annotated with @Bindable. In previous versions the default autobinding mode only binded public Page fields [CLK-648].
Added mock support for user principals and roles. This issue was raised and fixed by Sven Pfeiffer [CLK-585].
Added localized Date format pattern support. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-610].
Added Polish resource bundle for DateField. This issue was raised and fixed by Rafal Rusin [CLK-624].
Migrated controls to import resources through Elements and the getHeadElements method [CLK-647].
Improved SpringClickServlet to re-inject transient beans after stateful page deserialization. This feature is only supported when the stateful page instance is created by Click, not Spring [CLK-667].
Replaced Page and Control getMessage methods with varargs equivalents [CLK-604].
Removed Click core's dependency on Velocity. This issue was raised by by Andrey Rybin [CLK-606].
Replaced multiple ClickUtils close methods with a single method accepting a Closeable. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-620].
Improved ClickServlet to use the response's OutputStream if the Writer cannot be retrieved [CLK-644].
Fixed issue where RadioGroup label referenced a non-existing ID. RadioGroup is now wrapped inside a span tag with the given ID. This issue was raised and fixed by Finn Bock [CLK-577].
Fixed DateField to set seconds back to zero. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-664].
The menu.dtd has been published to http://click.apache.org/dtds/menu-2.2.dtd. If you want your configuration to conform to the menu.dtd, include the following declaration in your menu.xml:
```
<!DOCTYPE menu PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Click Menu 2.2//EN"
"http://click.apache.org/dtds/menu-2.2.dtd">
```
The new click-2.2.dtd has been published to http://click.apache.org/dtds/click-2.2.dtd. If you want your configuration to conform to the click.dtd, include the following declaration in your click.xml:
```
<!DOCTYPE click-app PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Click Configuration 2.2//EN"
"http://click.apache.org/dtds/click-2.2.dtd">
```

New examples:

Dynamic Form demonstrates how to dynamically add new Fields at runtime.
Dynamic FieldSet demonstrates how to dynamically add a FieldSet at runtime.
Dynamic Select demonstrates how to dynamically add fields based on a Select field value.
Disabled Demo demonstrates the behavior of disabled fields.

Enjoy.

- The Click team

Apache Click v2.2.0-RC1 now available

2010-05-01T22:36:00.000-07:00

Click 2.2.0-RC1 is now available. Major new features include DataProviders for on-demand data loading and a Page interceptor facility for implementing cross cutting concerns such as security and transaction handling. There are also improved support for dynamic forms and stateful pages.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.1.0 or earlier.
Download Click 2.2.0 RC1
Maven bundles
Live examples

New features and improvements:

Added DataProvider support for Table, Select, PickList and CheckList providing on demand loading of data. With DataProviders, users won't have to be concerned about which page event (onInit or onRender) to set the data on the control [CLK-640].
Added PagingDataProvider interface to support large paginated result sets for Tables [CLK-640].
Added a MenuFactory for creating and loading Menus from configuration files. All the static Menu methods have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
Added an option for MenuFactory to not statically cache menus. This allows developers to cache menus in different scopes such as HttpSession. [CLK-405].
Added i18n support for Menus loaded from menu.xml. The menu DTD now includes a new name attribute. By specifying a name attribute in menu.xml, the Menu will attempt to load its label and title from resource bundles [CLK-591].
Added a Page Interceptor facility that provides an extension point for code which can listen to key page events and also interrupt normal page processing flow. [CLK-598].
Added improved dynamic Form support. Forms can now optionally bypass validation for JavaScript based submissions using the new JavaScript function "Click.submit(formName, validate)" [CLK-638].
Added improved dynamic Page and Form behaviour through new helper methods that can bind and validate Forms and Fields before the onProcess page event e.g. in the Page constructor or "onInit" event. The new methods are:
- ClickUtils.bind(Field)
- ClickUtils.bind(Form)
- ClickUtils.bind(AbstractLink)
- ClickUtils.bindAndValidate(Field)
- ClickUtils.bindAndValidate(Form) [CLK-638]
Added improved disabled behavior through the following changes:
- Disabled fields are not processed or validated
- Disabled field values are not copied to domain objects
- Disabled fields are automatically enabled if the field has an incoming request parameter, indicating that the field was enabled on the client using JavaScript. Please note that this behavior does not apply to Checkbox or Radio fields. See the setDisabled() javadoc for details [CLK-646].
Added new method Container.replace for replacing an existing control with a new control. In previous releases, an exception would be raised if a page or container already contained a control with the same name as the newly added control. In 2.2.0 the replace method is automatically called when adding a control which name matches that of an existing control in the page or container. This behavior will likely only benefit stateful pages since stateless pages are recreated each request [CLK-666].
Added methods to Fields for styling their labels. See new methods Field.setLabelStyle(String) and Field.setLabelStyleClass(String). This issue was raised by Stefax [CLK-595].
Added methods to Fields for providing styling hints to their containing elements. See new methods Field.setParentStyleHint(String) and Field.setParentStyleClassHint(String). This issue was raised by Stefax [CLK-595].
Added trim property to Field for controlling if the Field request parameter is trimmed or not. See new method Field.setTrim(boolean). This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-627].
Added new Context methods Context.hasRequestParameter(String) and Context.hasRequestAttribute(String).
Added support to Select for a default option that can be used to validate non selection against and allows the Select to only populate its optionList at rendering time, instead of during onProcess event. [CLK-641].
Improved default autobinding mode to bind both public fields and fields annotated with @Bindable. In previous versions the default autobinding mode only binded public Page fields [CLK-648].
Added mock support for user principals and roles. This issue was raised and fixed by Sven Pfeiffer [CLK-585].
Added localized Date format pattern support. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-610].
Added Polish resource bundle for DateField. This issue was raised and fixed by Rafal Rusin [CLK-624].
Migrated controls to import resources through Elements and the getHeadElements method [CLK-647].
Improved SpringClickServlet to re-inject transient beans after stateful page deserialization. This feature is only supported when the stateful page instance is created by Click, not Spring [CLK-667].
Replaced Page and Control getMessage methods with varargs equivalents [CLK-604].
Removed Click core's dependency on Velocity. This issue was raised by by Andrey Rybin [CLK-606].
Replaced multiple ClickUtils close methods with a single method accepting a Closeable. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-620].
Improved ClickServlet to use the response's OutputStream if the Writer cannot be retrieved [CLK-644].
Fixed issue where RadioGroup label referenced a non-existing ID. RadioGroup is now wrapped inside a span tag with the given ID. This issue was raised and fixed by Finn Bock [CLK-577].
Fixed DateField to set seconds back to zero. This issue was raised by Andrey Rybin [CLK-664].
The menu.dtd has been published to http://click.apache.org/dtds/menu-2.2.dtd. If you want your configuration to conform to the menu.dtd, include the following declaration in your menu.xml:
```
<!DOCTYPE menu PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Click Menu 2.2//EN"
"http://click.apache.org/dtds/menu-2.2.dtd">
```
The new click-2.2.dtd has been published to http://click.apache.org/dtds/click-2.2.dtd. If you want your configuration to conform to the click.dtd, include the following declaration in your click.xml:
```
<!DOCTYPE click-app PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Click Configuration 2.2//EN"
"http://click.apache.org/dtds/click-2.2.dtd">
```

New examples:

Dynamic Form demonstrates how to dynamically add new Fields at runtime.
Dynamic FieldSet demonstrates how to dynamically add a FieldSet at runtime.
Dynamic Select demonstrates how to dynamically add fields based on a Select field value.
Disabled Demo demonstrates the behavior of disabled fields.

Enjoy.

- The Click team

ClickIDE 2.1.0.0 released: support Apache Click 2.1.0 and Eclipse 3.5

2010-02-19T22:02:00.001-08:00

The latest version of ClickIDE is available. This release supports Click 2.1.0 and Eclipse 3.5.

ClickIDE is based on Eclipse and the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP), and provides extended features for developing web applications using Click.

Important links:

Main features:

Fast switching between Page classes and templates (Ctrl+Alt+S)
Project creation wizard
Click page creation wizard
Visual editor for the Click configuration file
Velocity template editor
Spring Framework and Apache Cayenne Integration
Integrated Click documentation

New features and enhancements in 2.1.0.0:

Upgraded to Cayenne to 3.0 M6.
Added "Use PerformanceFilter" option in the project creation wizard.
Added switching comment action in the Velocity editor ([CTRL] + [/]).
Added (*) to required attributes in the click.xml editor.

Enjoy Click!

Apache Click becomes a Top-Level Project and v2.1.0 now available

2010-02-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

Apache Click has become a new Apache Top Level Project (TLP), signifying that Click is a well-governed project under the Apache Software Foundation principles.

Furthermore Click 2.1.0 has been released sporting many new features, including support for Google App Engine, a free Java hosting environment from Google.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes - full list of new features, improvements and bug fixes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.0.1 or earlier.
Download Click 2.1.0
Maven bundles
Live examples

New features and improvements:

Added support for Google App Engine, a free Java hosting environment from Google. This provides an ideal environment for students and startups to easily host their Click applications online. See GoogleAppEngineListener for details [560].
Added support for an in-memory File Upload Service that can be used for uploading files in a Google App Engine environment.
Added support for templates with custom extensions through the new ConfigService.isTemplate method. The default ConfigService implementation, XmlConfigService, provides support for the extensions .htm and .jsp, but new extensions can be provided in a subclass. See the JavaDoc for details [568].
Added support to the Page class for conditionally including Control head elements through the new method includeControlHeadElements [571].
Added support to deploy resources inside JARs from the Servlet 3.0 compliant location, META-INF/resources. Click's own pre-packaged resources are now also located in the JAR under META-INF/resources [570].
Added new Calendar popup to DateField. This Calendar popup uses Calendar Date Select which is based on the Prototype JavaScript library.
Please note if you don't want a dependency on the Prototype library you can use the third-party Click Calendar instead.
Added first class support for HEAD elements such as JavaScript and Css. The following classes were added: Element, ResourceElement, JsImport, JsScript, CssImport and CssStyle. A new method was added to Page and Control: Control.getHeadElements() and Page.getHeadElements() [501].
Added SubmitLink control that can submit a Form [519].
Added HiddenList control for rendering and submitting a list of hidden fields [491].
Added pluggable security access controller (AccessController) to Menu class. This pluggable interface enable use of security frameworks such as Spring Security (Acegi) or JSecurity to control user access to Menu items. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis [406].
Added an Ant task, called DeployTask, for deploying static resources at build time. This task is useful when deploying Click applications in restricted environments. For more details see the section: deploying resources in a restricted environment.
Added a ResourceService, for serving static resources at runtime. This service is useful when deploying Click applications in restricted environments. For more details see the section: deploying resources in a restricted environment [564].
Added method, ClickUtils.createTemplateModel, which returns a template model containing objects such as the Context path, Page path, HTTP request, HTTP response, HTTP session etc.
Added ability to specify a custom TreeNode icon through the new method TreeNode.setIcon(String). This issue was raised and fixed by Tim Hooper [494].
Added method Format.url for encoding URL's in templates [399].
Added method FieldColumn.setProperty that can be overriden to provide custom binding for complex domain objects. This issue was raised and fixed by WarnerJan Veldhuis [528].
Added TypeConverter configuration option to ClickServlet. See getTypeConverter() method for details. This issue was raised Joseph Schmidt and fixed by Adrian A. [539].
Added Slf4jLogService for supporting multiple application servers. This issue was raised Oliver Burn [555].
Added @Bindable annotation support for page field autobinding. @Bindable supports public, protected and private Page variables [556, 599 ].
Added property files with translation for the Russian language. This issue was raised and fixed by Andrey Rybin [607], [611].
Added new Tree methods setWidth / getWidth and setHeight / getHeight. Also fixed rendering issues in IE6/7 for long node labels that overflow the tree width [616].
The click.dtd has been published to http://click.apache.org/dtds/click-2.1.dtd.

If you want your configuration to conform to the click.dtd, include the following declaration in your click.xml:

<!DOCTYPE click-app PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Click Configuration 2.1//EN"
"http://click.apache.org/dtds/click_2_1.dtd">

Improved Form validation to allow Form subclasses to override the validate method and implement cross-field validation. The following changes were made: the previous validate method was renamed to validateFileUpload and a new empty validate method was introduced, that can safely be overridden in subclasses [572].
Improved Page redirect to support parameters. See the new Page methods setRedirect(String, Map) and setRedirect(Class, Map) This issue was raised and fixed by Adrian [536].
Improved Link Controls to support multivalued parameters through the new AbstractLink methods getParameterValues() and setParameterValues() [554].
Improved Table to support very large datasets by promoting the methods getFirstRow() and getLastRow() as public. These methods provide the necessary information to only retrieve the displayed rows [504].
Improved LinkDecorator to support target identfier property parameter names. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis and fixed by fixed by Adrian A. [400].
Improved PickList methods getValueObject() and setValueObject(Object) to delegate to getSelectedValues() and addSelectedValue(String) respectively [490].
Improved Spring integration with SpringClickServlet and PageScopeResolver, supporting Spring instantiated Pages with @Component configuration [534].
Improved CompressionServletResponseWrapper and CompressionResponseStream classes to have public visibility to enable use in custom servlet Filters [547].
Improved Menu control to render attribute class="selected" when the menu item is selected. This issue was raised and fixed by Frederic Daoud [551].
Improved PerformanceFilter to implement exclude-paths filtering [498].
Improved XmlConfigService to scan for deployable resources inside folders on the classpath [552].
Improved Cayenne DataContextFilter, including adding support for LifecycleListener registration [559].
Improved AbstractLink to allow rendering of both icon and label in Link controls (default behavior renders either a label or an icon) [535].
Improved Page and Control message handling with null args. This issue was raised by WarnerJan Veldhuis [600].
Fixed resource deployment on JBoss 5 and up. The solution is based on the work done by the Stripes Framework developers [589].

Deprecated:

Deprecated methods: Control.getHtmlImports() and Page.getHtmlImports(). These methods have been deprecated in favor of Control.getHeadElements() and Page.getHeadElements().
Deprecated methods: Page.getPageImports() and Page.setPageImports(). These methods have been deprecated in favor of Page.getHeadElements().

Updated third-party libraries:

Update Velocity library to version 1.6.3.
Update Cayenne library to version 3.0M6.
Update Prototype.js library to version 1.6.1.

New Documentation:

Documentation has been converted to Docbook and are made available in three different flavors: PDF, HTML (single page) and HTML (multiple pages). Thanks to Gilberto C Andrade for doing the conversion [482].
Added a new section, Deploying resources in a restricted environment, describing how to deploy static resources in environments where WAR/EAR are not unpacked or where file system permissions are restricted, such as Google App Engine.
Added documentation describing the new HEAD element support. Please see the new section on Page HEAD elements and the section on Control HEAD elements.

New examples:

Page HEAD elements demonstrates how to add JsImport, JsScript, CssImport and CssStyle HEAD elements to a Page.
Control HEAD elements demonstrates how to add JsImport and CssImport HEAD elements to a custom Control.
SubmitLink Demo shows how to use the new SubmitLink control.
Large Dataset is an example of a Table with a large number of rows and how to lazily page through the rows using a custom data provider.
Reusable Panel is an example of a reusable Panel which provides a Form for capturing Client details.
Quartz Job Scheduler is an example demonstrating how to integrate the Quartz Job Scheduling framework into a Click application.
Excel Table Exporter example demonstrates how to export a Click Table to an Excel spreadsheet using Apache POI.

Enjoy.

- The Click team

New book: Getting Started With Apache Click

2010-01-05T13:25:00.000-08:00

We start 2010 with some great news. Freddy Daoud just announced his new book: Getting started with Apache Click. Finally, a book is available on the Click framework that provides a great way for getting started quickly.

From the website:

This book will help you get started with this excellent framework, starting with the basics and moving on to creating a sample application. You'll also learn how to integrate popular third-party frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Java Persistence API (JPA), and more.

There is also a chapter on authentication and authorization which integrates Click and Apache Shiro, an open source security framework also hosted at Apache.

You can view the book table of contents here, and download the example source code here.

Enjoy.

The Click team.

Netbeans plugin released for Apache Click

2009-10-24T01:23:00.000-07:00

Hantsy Bai has announced the release of a Netbeans plugin for Apache Click. Netbeans users can now enjoy the same features provided by ClickIDE, the Eclipse based plugin.

Please note the plugin targets Netbeans 6.7.1 and might not work with earlier versions.

Features of the plugin includes:

Wizard for creating a new Click project
Wizard for creating new pages and templates
Quickly switch between a Page class, template and property (you can also define keyboard shortcuts for these functions)
Provides basic code completion, error checking, hyperlinking and refactoring for click.xml and menu.xml

Not sure if its a feature of the plugin or of Netbeans itself, but the plugin automatically recognized my existing Click projects which is a nice touch.

Here are some screenshots of the plugin in action.

• Create a new Click project:

• Create a new Click page and template:

• Switch to the Page template:

• Switch to the Page class:

• Define keyboard shortcuts for the "Go to Page Class", "Go to Page Template" and "Go to Page Properties" functions:

Click Calendar 1.0.2 now available

2009-07-19T03:04:00.000-07:00

Click Calendar 1.0.2 has been released fixing a bug in DateField that can disable Fields when the popup is closed.

Changes are:

Fixed DateField calendar popup which blocked keyboard input events after popup was destroyed. This issue was raised by Christophe FOIRET [567].

The Click team.

Click 1.5.3 now available

2009-07-18T01:37:00.000-07:00

Click 1.5.3 is the latest maintenance release in the 1.5 series. It fixes a bug in DateField that can disable Fields when the popup is closed.

Please note that this is a non-Apache release. For new projects use Apache Click which is continuing the development of this framework.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from a previous release.
Download Click 1.5.3
Maven bundles
Live examples

Changes are:

Fixed DateField calendar popup which blocked keyboard input events after popup was destroyed. Only Internet Explorer is affected. This issue was raised by Christophe FOIRET [567].
Fixed maven pom to refer to the correct Velocity groupId.
Updated Velocity documentation to version 1.6.2.

The Click team.

Click 2.1.0-RC1 now available

2009-06-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

The Apache Click team is proud to announce the first release candidate of Click 2.1.0. This is our first release that requires Java 5.

All bugs fixes from 1.5.2 are included as well as a slew of new features, examples and documentation. The documentation has been converted to the Docbook format and are made available in three different flavors: PDF, HTML (single page) and HTML (multiple pages).

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 2.0.1 or earlier.
Download Click 2.1.0-RC1
Maven bundles
Live examples

New features:

Added new Calendar popup to DateField. This Calendar popup uses Calendar Date Select which is based on the Prototype JavaScript library. Please note if you don't want a dependency on the Prototype library you can use the third-party Click Calendar instead.
Added first class support for HEAD elements such as JavaScript and Css. The following classes were added: Element, ResourceElement, JsImport, JsScript, CssImport and CssStyle. A new method was added to Page and Control: Control.getHeadElements() and Page.getHeadElements() [501].
Added SubmitLink control that can submit a Form [519].
Added HiddenList control for rendering and submitting a list of hidden fields [491].
Added plug-able security access controller (AccessController) to Menu class. This plubable interface enable use of security frameworks such as Spring Security (Acegi) or JSecurity to control user access to Menu items. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis [406].
Added method, ClickUtils.createTemplateModel, that returns a template model containing objects such as the Context path, Page path, HTTP request, HTTP response, HTTP session etc. This method is useful when rendering custom templates.
Added ability to specify a custom TreeNode icon through the new method TreeNode.setIcon(String). This issue was raised and fixed by Tim Hooper [494].
Added method Format.url for encoding URL's in templates [399].
Added method FieldColumn.setProperty that can be overriden to provide custom binding for complex domain objects. This issue was raised and fixed by WarnerJan Veldhuis [528].
Added TypeConverter configuration option to ClickServlet. See getTypeConverter() method for details. This issue was raised Joseph Schmidt and fixed by Adrian A. [539].
Added Slf4jLogService for supporting multiple application servers. This issue was raised Oliver Burn [555].
Added @Bindable annotation support for page field autobinding [556].
Improved Page redirect to support parameters. See the new Page methods setRedirect(String, Map) and setRedirect(Class, Map) This issue was raised and fixed by Adrian [536].
Improved Link Controls to support multivalued parameters through the new AbstractLink methods getParameterValues() and setParameterValues() [554].
Improved Table to support very large datasets by promoting the methods getFirstRow() and getLastRow() as public. These methods provide the necessary information to only retrieve the displayed rows [504].
Improved LinkDecorator to support target identfier property parameter names. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis and fixed by fixed by Adrian A. [400].
Improved PickList methods getValueObject() and setValueObject(Object) to delegate to getSelectedValues() and addSelectedValue(String) respectively [490].
Improved Spring integration with SpringClickServlet and PageScopeResolver, supporting Spring instantiated Pages with @Component configuration [534].
Improved CompressionServletResponseWrapper and CompressionResponseStream classes to have public visibility to enable use in custom servlet Filters [547].
Improved Menu control to render attribute class="selected" when the menu item is selected. This issue was raised and fixed by Frederic Daoud [551].
Improved PerformanceFilter to implement exclude-paths filtering [498].
Improved XmlConfigService to scan for deployable resources inside folders on the classpath [552].
Improved Cayenne DataContextFilter, including adding support for LifecycleListener registration [559].
Fixed PerformanceFilter and CompressionFilter to properly handle requests [557].

Deprecated:

Deprecated methods: Control.getHtmlImports() and Page.getHtmlImports(). These methods have been deprecated in favor of Control.getHeadElements() and Page.getHeadElements().

Updated third-party libraries:

Update Velocity library to version 1.6.2.
Update Cayenne library to version 3.0M6.
Update Prototype.js library to version 1.6.1_RC2.

New Documentation:

Documentation has been converted to Docbook and are made available in three different flavors: PDF, HTML (single page) and HTML (multiple pages). Thanks to Gilberto C Andrade for doing the conversion [482].
Added documentation describing the new HEAD element support. Please see the new section on Page HEAD elements and the section on Control HEAD elements.

New examples:

Page HEAD elements demonstrates how to add JsImport, JsScript, CssImport and CssStyle HEAD elements to a Page.
Control HEAD elements demonstrates how to add JsImport and CssImport HEAD elements to a custom Control.
SubmitLink Demo shows how to use the new SubmitLink control.
Large Dataset is an example of a Table with a large number of rows and how to lazily page through the rows using a custom data provider.
Reusable Panel is an example of a reusable Panel which provides a Form for capturing Client details.
Quartz Job Scheduler is an example demonstrating how to integrate the Quartz Job Scheduling framework into a Click application.

Enjoy.

- The Click team

---

Apache Click is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.

Click 1.5.2 now available

2009-05-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

Click 1.5.2 is another maintenance release in the 1.5 series. It also includes some new features such as a plug-able security access controller and improved Spring integration.

Please note that this is a non-Apache release. For new projects use Apache Click which is continuing the development of this framework.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from a previous release.
Download Click 1.5.2
Maven bundles
Live examples

Changes are:

Added plug-able security access controller (AccessController) to Menu class. This plug-able interface enable use of security frameworks such as ACEGI or JSecurity to control user access to Menu items. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis [406].
Improved performance in situations where many controls are added to a page by decreasing the buffer size used for including HTML imports.
Improved Column decorator error handling [495].
Improved PerformanceFilter to implement exclude-paths filtering [498].
Improved Spring integration with SpringClickServlet [534].
Improved CompressionServletResponseWrapper and CompressionResponseStream classes to have public visibility to enable use in custom servlet Filters [547].
Fixed Column sorting to recognize numbers inside strings. This issue was raised by Venkatt Guhesan [489].
Fixed a bug where FieldSet was not set as the parent of its child controls. This issue was raised by James P Brown [497].
Fixed DateField setup to destroy the DHTML calendar instance when the popup is closed. This fixes a memory leak where calendar instances are not cleaned up [499].
Fixed FormTable sorting bug. Added FormTable sort methods setSortedColumn, setSortedAscending, setPageNumber for programmatic sorting. This issue was raised and fixed by Ben Warner [527].
Fixed a bug in AutoCompleteTextField where if the field was removed from a Form, its JavaScript resources would still be rendered. This issue was raised by Paul Zammit [546].
Fixed extras pom.xml dependencies [492].
Updated Velocity library to version 1.6.2.

Enjoy.

The Click team.

Documentation ported to Docbook

2009-03-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

Gilberto C. Andrade recently ported Click's documentation to Docbook using Michael Fuchs HTML to Docbook converter.

This is really great news as we can now generate the documentation in both PDF and HTML formats.

Below is a screenshot of how the PDF looks like:

And here is how the HTML version looks like:

To generate the docs we use a modified version of the Velocity Docbook Framework. The modifications include upgrading to the latest versions of Apache FOP and Docbook XLS.

To achieve syntax highlighting for our source code we include the XSLTHL library.

The only issue I encountered was that XSLTHL doesn't work with the latest official Docbook XLS release. Luckily the latest snapshot of Docbook XLS resolved the issue.

We hope the new format will make it easier to read and learn Click.

The Click team.

Apache Click 2.0.1 now available

2009-02-15T14:34:00.000-08:00

Apache Click 2.0.1 is the first release from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator and is based on the 1.5.1 code base.

Both 1.5.1 and 2.0.1 are considered stable and only bug fixes will be applied to these branches. New development will happen on 2.1.0, the next major version of Apache Click.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click 2.0.1
Maven bundles
Live examples

For this release we had to make some changes especially around incompatible licensed third-party software. Below is a short summary of these changes. More details and upgrade notes can be found in Roadmap and Changes.

Changes are:

Packages were renamed to 'org.apache.click'. When upgrading from older releases you will need to convert from 'net.sf.click' to 'org.apache.click'.
DateField used the incompatibly licensed JSCalendar which had to be dropped. Don't worry though, DateField still exists and has been converted to a TextField which understands how to parse and format Date objects. Further a new Click Calendar project was created which is a port of the old DateField functionality. The Click Calendar jar contains a single class called CalendarField which subclasses DateField and has the same API and functionality as the old DateField. When upgrading you can just rename your old DateField to CalendarField to get the popup calendar working.
The Chart controls was also using an incompatible licensed JavaScript library and these components was removed. A new project called Click Charts was created for these components. They still use the 'net.sf.click' package so no code changes will be necessary.

The next major release will be 2.1.0 and a new feature roadmap is being determined.

Enjoy.

The Click team.

---

Apache Click is an effort undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), sponsored by the Apache Incubator PMC. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF.

Click 1.5.1 now available

2009-01-23T03:57:00.000-08:00

Click 1.5.1 is a minor maintenance release which includes Turkish language support, improved exception handling and some minor bug fixes.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from a previous release.
Download Click 1.5.1
Maven bundles
Live examples

Changes are:

Added Turkish language support. This issue was raised and fixed by Ali Ok. [476].
Improved exception handling when a Control name is not defined [473].
Added new constructors to extra controls which accepts the size attribute. This issue was raised by Christophe Foiret [475].
Added MessageFormat support to Format through the methods message(String, Object) and message(String, List). This issue was raised by Yu Kobayashi [474].
Added new methods to CheckboxTree for improved customization. The new methods include renderCheckbox and getInputType.
Added csv mime type. This issue was raised by Alvin Townsend.
Fixed URL rendering to encode ampersand characeters. [483].
Fixed HiddenField to work with java.sql.Timestamp, java.sql.Time and java.sql.Date. [484].
Fixed WebappLoader to reload Velocity global macro's [467].
Fixed Page.setRedirect to check if redirect path starts with context path. This issue was raised by Christophe Foiret [468].
Fixed a regression when manually setting the Page path to a JSP. [141].
Fixed DateField's French translation. This issue was raised by Alvin Townsend.

Enjoy.

The Click team.

ClickIDE 2.1.0 released: support Click 1.5

2008-11-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

A new version of ClickIDE is available. This release supports Click 1.5 and Eclipse 3.4/WTP 3.0.

Important links:

Enjoy Click!

Click 1.5 final is released!

2008-11-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

Click 1.5 is production ready and available for download.

This is our biggest release yet with numerous new features, enhancements, documentation and examples.

We would like to thank everyone for their contributions to the 1.5 release.

Important links:

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from a previous release.
Download Click 1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

Highlights for 1.5 include:

Container - new interface for building arbitrary complex, hierarchical Controls.
ActionListener - new interface provides compile time safety and support for code refactoring tools.
Performance have been enhanced by rendering markup from a single buffer. In previous releases each Control managed its own internal String buffer. Our tests indicate performance gains of up to 40%.
Services - Click core has been refactored into pluggable services.
Added Freemarker support as an alternative templating engine to Velocity. See FreemarkerTemplateService for configuration details.
Provide three logging service implementations: ConsoleLogService, JdkLogService and Log4JLogService
Mock Test Support - introduces an easy to use package to write Unit and Functional Tests.
ControlRegistry - enables two phase listener dispatch, which allows Controls to bind request parameters before listeners are fired.
A new deployment strategy allows deployment of resources directly from jars.
New Renderable interface allows alternative paginator implementations for Table. Two implementations are available with Click 1.5: TablePaginator and TableInlinePaginator.
A new Powered by Click section was added. If you would like to add your own site to this list, please drop us a mail at one of our Mailing Lists, or directly to "sabob1gmailcom".

New documentation:

Container explains the new Container concept
Template vs Programmatic layout explains different layout strategies
Mock Test Support provides overview of the new testing support in 1.5
Deploying custom resources describes how to deploy resources such as JavaScript, CSS and images
Multiple pages packages allows you to host or integrate pages from separate packages

New examples:

Wizard demo shows how to leverage a stateful page and Panels to create a process flow. Each Step in the process is represented by a Panel which is managed by the stateful Page.
Populate on select shows how items in one combo box is populated based on the selected item in another using JavaScript.
FormTable demo shows how a FormTable can be used together with an existing Form.
Page link tree provides a demonstration of using the Tree component to link to different pages.
Table paginators shows the different paginators available
Country Select field allows users to pick from a list of countries
Custom Form Layout using Containers shows how to use a Container for laying out forms
Virtual Keyboard provides a graphical Vitural Keyboard text field control

Issues resolved since RC3:

Added Dutch language support, contributed by Christopher Highway.
Improved Form to process controls even if their names is not defined. [463].
Fixed ContainerUtils.copyTo where the wrong getter method could be used when a domain object contains multiple overloaded getter methods. This issue was raised by Alvin Townsend [461].
Fixed Column internal Comparator which does not take sort order into consideration for non Comparable instances [462].
Fixed Panel.getId() to return null if name is not defined [464].
Fixed VelocityTemplateService to cater for custom defined Velocity loggers. This issue was raised by Vikram Natarajan [465].

Enjoy Click!

The Click team.

Click 1.5 RC 3 is here!

2008-10-20T12:30:00.000-07:00

This marks the third (and final) release candidate as Click is rapidly progressing towards a stable 1.5.

We urge everyone to try out RC3 and provide feedback via our mailing lists and issue tracker.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click 1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

New examples for this release:

Wizard demo shows how to leverage a stateful page and Panels to create a process flow. Each Step in the process is represented by a Panel which is managed by the stateful Page.
Populate on select shows how items in one combo box is populated based on the selected item in another using JavaScript.
FormTable demo shows how a FormTable can be used together with an existing Form.
Page link tree provides a demonstration of using the Tree component to link to different pages.

New documentation:

Added a full configuration example containing all click.xml DTD elements and attributes.

Issues resolved for RC3:

Added FormTable.properties containing a new property formtable-error. When adding FormTable to an external From, the formtable-error will be displayed if one of the FormTable fields contains an error.
Renamed ContainerUtils method getFields to getInputFields which better reflect its behavior [457].
Fixed TabbedForm and TabbedCayenneForm to import JavaScript and CSS from their superclass. This issue was raised by Christophe Foiret [450].
Fixed CayenneForm performing multiple inserts [452].
Fixed FormTable duplicate HTML imports [453].
Fixed XmlConfigService not deploying JAR resources [454].
Fixed Page.setRedirect to guard against duplicate context paths. This issue was raised and fixed by Ricardo Lecheta [456].
Fixed CountrySelect to exclude duplicate countries. This issue was raised and fixed by Christopher Highway [458].

Enjoy Click.

The Click team.

Click 1.5 Release Candidate 2 is available!

2008-09-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

RC1 introduced a severe bug which hampered Click from deploying properly. To resolve this issue we are making RC2 immediately available.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Please try out RC2 and provide feedback via our mailing lists or issue tracker.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click 1.5 RC2
Maven bundles
Live examples

Issues resolved for RC2:

Emergency Fix: Click throws FileNotFoundException when deploying click-extras.jar [448].
Added new method Page.removeControl which enables Click to automatically remove a Control from its parent when adding it to another Container. This issue was raised and fixed by Ricardo Lecheta [449].
Added utility methods ClickUtils.encodeURL and ClickUtils.decodeURL for encoding and decoding URL's using the "UTF-8" encoding scheme.

The Click team.

Click 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is now available!

2008-09-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

This should be the last release before 1.5 final. We have received good feedback and a large number of issues have been resolved. Thanks to everybody for their contributions in making this release possible.

We urge everybody to try out RC1 and provide feedback via our mailing lists and issue tracker.

Apache Incubation Status:

As you might know already Click was voted to undergo incubation at Apache Incubator. One of our tasks is to migrate current infrastructure to the new hosting. New mailing lists have been setup for users and developers. Information on subscribing to the new mailing lists can be found here. If you would like to unsubscribe from the existing SourceForge lists follow the instructions here.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

Highlights for this release:

Refactored Paginator into a more generic interface called Renderable which is independent of any specific Control
Added Table Row attribute support through new method addRowAttributes.
Field error messages can now be specified per instance. See the JavaDoc for more details.

Issues resolved for RC1:

Refactored Paginator into a more generic interface called Renderable which is independent of any specific Control [434].
Add new LinkDecorator methods renderActionLink and renderActionButton. This allows more fine grained control over the rendered links, for example manipulating request parameters. [446].
Add Table Row attribute support through new method addRowAttributes. This issue was raised by Hans Poo [431].
Field error messages can now be specified per instance. See the JavaDoc for more details. This issue was raised and fixed by Ricardo Lecheta [433].
Added new utility methods copyContainerToObject and copyObjectToContainer to selectively exclude or include form fields when populating domain objects. This issue was raised by Khalef Bessaih [440].
Encapsulate conversion logic of template extensions inside Page.setRedirect(java.lang.String) which allows one to override or overload the default behavior. This issue was raised by David Ballard [429].
Improved Table so that subclasses can specify a different controlLink implementation by overriding getControlLink(). This issue was raised and fixed by Ricardo Lecheta [442].
Improved ClickUtils.toLabel to return empty String ("") if argument is null [441].
Improved DateField to return a cached Date representation on subsequent retrievals. This issue was raised by Tore Halset [316].
Fixed RegexField validation to ignore empty values. This issue was raised by Muzaffer Ozakca [436].
Fixed TabbedPanel to trigger the registered tab listener. This issue was raised by Marcelo Grassi Franco Melgaço. [432].
Improved redirect and forward to JSP templates. [435].
Fixed HtmlFieldSet to properly close the fieldset end tag. This issue was raised by Gilberto C. Andrade [427].
Fixed AbstractContainerField not to bind its request parameter. This issue was raised by Gilberto C. Andrade [428].
Fixed Column which exposed its internal Comparator as public API through Column.setComparator(Comparator), instead of java.util.Comparator. [430].
Fixed LinkDecorator not to add Table parameters to PageLink, as it is redundant. This issue was raised by Joel Schmidt [270].

Enjoy Click.

The Click team.

Click 1.5 M3 is now available!

2008-08-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

Milestone 3 is the final milestone in the 1.5 series and provides much improved backward compatibility.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

Highlights for this release:

New features include a pluggable Paginator for Table and two implementations: DefaultPaginator and InlinePaginator.
Major refactoring to improve backward compatibility and upgrade path. This includes removing BasicForm and adding new Controls HtmlForm and HtmlFieldSet.
Added support for multiple page package definitions in click.xml configuration

New documentation:

Multiple pages packages

New examples:

Table paginators

Issues resolved:

Added readonly and disabled support to FieldSet. If enabled Fields contained in FieldSet will be disabled or made readonly. [423].
Added Table footer rendering support, so that column totals can be rendered in a table [425].
Improved Table rendering performance in the order of 25-45%.
Improved rendering performance by caching the ClickUtils resource version indicator [412].
Improved Page and PageImports to allow a Pages to optimize their HTML imports. Please see Click Examples for a demonstration [363].
Fixed issue where Select validation can throw ClassCastException when option list contains an OptionGroup. This issue was identifier by Christophe Foiret [374].
Fixed issue where Container can be added to itself. This issue was identifier by Harry Wissiak [414].
Fixed Page serialization issues with non serializable Format and PageImport objects. This issue was identifier by Alexei Sokolov [416].
Fixed issue where CayenneForm clearValues() was hidden data object classname. This issue was identifier by Wisking Ju Yu Wu [417].
Fixed issue where TabbedPanel was invoking the activePanel's onInit() method twice. This issue was identifier by Wisking Ju Yu Wu [420].

Enjoy Click.

The Click team.

Click 1.5 M2 now available!

2008-07-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

Click 1.5 Milestone 2 is available for download. This is the second installment in the 1.5 development branch and provides important new features and bug fixes.

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from 1.4 or earlier.
Download Click1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

Highlights for this release:

ActionListener - new interface provides compile time safety and support for code refactoring tools.
ControlRegistry - enables two phase listener dispatch, which allows Controls to bind request parameters before listeners are fired.
Introduced a new resource deployment strategy for Jars containing Page and Control resources.

New documentation:

Deploying custom resources

Issues resolved:

Added a new PageButton control [392].
Add new method CheckboxTree.setSelectChildNodes that enables selecting child nodes when parent is selected. This feature only works if the Tree's Javascript support is enabled. [209].
Added Romanian property files. This issue was raised and fixed by Marius Petrus [361].
Add width support to TabbedPanel control [376].
Add ClickUtils autoPostRedirect() method to support SAML integration [398].
Renamed Container.add(int, Control) to Container.insert(Control, int) [381].
Update Form to use control message bundles for label required prefix/suffix [383].
Update HtmlStringBuffer to support method chaining. This issue was raised by Demetrios Kyriakis [396].
Updated Menu to only be cached in production or profile modes. [408].
Moved AbstractContainerField control to Click Extras. [410].
Fixed TabbedPanel bug whereby inactive panel HTML imports are included in page [366].
Fixed bug when manually invalidating HttpSession [371].
Fixed PropertySelect add ordering to query bug [372].
Fixed message properties to resolve all parent messages [373].
Fixed Labels not rendering in a FieldSet bug [377].
Fixed Form removeField throws IllegalArgumentException bug [378].
Fixed bug where Format is not available in template of stateful pages. [409].

Enjoy Click.

The Click team.

Click 1.5 Milestone 1 released!

2008-05-19T07:09:00.001-07:00

Click 1.5 Milestone 1 has been released yesterday. This is the first installment in the 1.5 development branch and provides a host of new features. Important links:

Click Home
Roadmap and Changes
Upgrade Path - please see the upgrade path when upgrading from a previous release.
Download Click1.5
Maven bundles
Live examples

Highlights for 1.5-M1 include:

Container - new interface for building arbitrary complex, hierarchical Controls.
Services - Click core has been refactored into pluggable services.
Added Freemarker support as an alternative templating engine to Velocity. See FreemarkerTemplateService for configuration details.
Mock Test Support - introduces an easy to use package to write Unit and Functional Tests.
A new Powered by Click section was added. If you would like to add your own site to this list, please send us a mail to one of our Mailing Lists, or directly to "sabob1 at gmail.com".
More examples and documentation.

New Examples:

New documentation:

Issues resolved:

Improved performance by rendering from a single non-blocking buffer.
Added a Country Select control based on the JDK's own built in Country/Locale support.
Added a Virtual Keyboard control using GreyWyvern JavaScript library.
Added support for setting Form action URL attribute. This issue was raised by Erdem Gunay [319].
Added support for Page HTML imports with a new getHtmlImports() method. This enables Pages to programatically define HTML imports which will be included in a border template using the PageImports object. This issue was raised by David Frizelle [329].
Add Page setTemplate(String) method to enable dynamic changing of a page border template. This issue was raised by Huy Do [353].
Updated Page.setPath to handle JSP resources. This issue was raised and fixed by Huy Do. [141].
Added support for Hibernate AnnocationConfiguration. This issue was fixed by Jean-Francois. [355].
Improved FileUpload support. This issue was raised by Ricardo Lecheta [326].
Improve File Upload support with new FileUploadService class. [326].
Fixed Cayenne PropertySelect which is not reset to original value. This is was raised by Tore Halset [317].
Fixed Cayenne 3.0M3 DataObjectUtils issue in CayenneForm when using JDK 1.5. Added CayenneUtils helper class [342].

Enjoy.

The Click team.

Click 1.4.2 maintenance release is available!

2008-05-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Click 1.4.2 is a minor maintenance release.

This release fixes a problem when using SpringClickServlet and excluded urls. We have also fixed a slight performance degradation since the 1.4 release.

Changes include:

Fix a slight performance degradation over the 1.4 release [349].
Fixed ExcludePage - should be a public inner class [346].
Fixed Maven artifact packaging [348].
Fixed PageLink to work with JSP pages [352].
Fix DateField and ChartFields to include control.js [354].
Fix DateField which could produce duplicate stylesheet head includes [356].

Enjoy.

The Click team.

Click supports functional and unit testing!

2008-04-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

One of the first features completed for the upcoming 1.5 release, was to revamp the mock package and add functional and unit testing support. There is no need to extend any classes or override methods. Testing works out of the box.

For testing purposes there are two classes of interest: MockContainer and MockContext.
(Since 1.5 has not yet publicly available I will just refer to the actual source code)

Which class to use depends on what you want to test.

If you want to test your pages (functional tests) use the MockContainer which simulates a servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty. With the container one will be enable to mock page requests, form submissions, file uploads, navigation etc.

In order to use MockContainer you need to specify a web directory where the container can find resources such as javascript, stylesheets and images. The easiest way to achieve this is to point the container to your project's web directory.

Example usage:

public class IntegrationTest extends TestCase {
    public void testFirstPage() {
        // Specify the project web directory for example: 'c:/dev/web'
        MockContainer container = new MockContainer("c:/dev/web");

        // Bootstrap the container
        container.start();

        // Set a request parameter
        container.setParameter("myparam", "Some parameter");

        // Simulate a user requesting the page, FirstPage. FirstPage will forward to SecondPage.
        FirstPage page = (FirstPage) container.testPage(FirstPage.class);

        // Assert that FirstPage does indeed forward to SecondPage
        Assert.assertTrue(container.getForwardPageClass(), SecondPage.class);

        container.stop();
    }
}

MockContext on the other hand is useful for testing custom controls (components).

Note that it is not necessary to specify a web directory when using MockContext.

Example usage:

public class ValidationFieldTest extends TestCase {

    public void testValidationField() {

        // Initialize the context.
        MockContext context = MockContext.initContext();

        int maxLength = 10;
        String fieldName = "name";
        ValidationField field = new ValidationField(fieldName, maxLength);

        // Retrieve the request and set field request parameter.
        MockRequest request = context.getMockRequest();
        request.setParameter(fieldName, "value");

        // onProcess binds the request attribute and field value
        assertTrue(textField.onProcess());

        // Assert that the field is still valid.
        assertTrue(textField.isValid());
    }
}

That is all there is to it.

The API is still evolving and feedback is appreciated. Our mailing lists are available here:

Click 1.4.1 is available!

2008-03-31T11:21:00.000-07:00

Click web framework version 1.4.1 is now available. First up the links:

This release fixes a number of important JSP and Ajax related bugs.

Changes include:

Added new method Context.isAjaxRequest() which enables conditional checking for Ajax requests.
Improved alphanumeric column sorting. This issue was raised by Ben Young. [344]
Upgradeded to Scriptaculous 1.8.1 to fix auto form submit. This issue was raised by Andy Key. [336]
Fixed sendRedirect to convert .jsp extension to .htm when redirecting to a JSP page. [338]
Fixed Form clearValues() to exclude certain HiddenFields from being cleared. [337]
Fixed Form action incorrect when using JSP. This issue was raised by Chas Erickson. [334]
Fixed Form.onSubmitCheck() to ignore Ajax calls. This issue was raised by Ivan Furdi. [333]
Fixed Form and FieldSet column layout bug [331].

For those interested in the latest development release (1.5M1) can view the roadmap below:

1.5M1 roadmap

Enjoy.

The Click team.

ClickIDE 2.0.0 released: now with Cayenne and Spring support

2008-03-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

Naoki Takezoe has released the latest version of ClickIDE. This release supports Click Framework 1.4 and Eclipse 3.3/WTP 2.0.
Important links:

There have been a couple of important new features:

New Features:

Generates Click project with Cayenne and Spring support.
Added new Cayenne mapping project creation wizard.
Added Cayenne Modeler launcher.
Wizard generates an empty cayenne.xml and launches it with Cayenne Modeler.
Added classpath variables "CAYENNE_LIB" and "CAYENNE_NODEPS_LIB". You can add cayenne.jar or cayenne-nodeps.jar to your project classpath using these variables from the project build path settings.
Additional Velocity variables configuration for code completion in the project property page.

Enjoy Click!

Click 1.4 final released!

2008-03-04T00:58:00.000-08:00

Click 1.4 has been released yesterday. A big thanks goes to all users and developers for their contributions in making this release possible. Important links:

Click is a simple and intuitive page and component oriented Java web framework. There are no unnecessary abstractions or complex concepts to learn and understand. Pages and components are developed in Java while layouts are specified in Velocity or JSP. You don't have to repeat component hierarchies in your view as each component knows how to render itself.

Highlights for 1.4 includes:

Stateful page support which really make developing complex pages and page flows much easier.
New PerformanceFilter which gives your applications Yahoo style performance for very little effort.
New AutoCompleteTextField control which gives you Ajax google suggest functionality.
New Ant task to build quickly build application templates or scaffolding.
Added support for Cayenne versions 2.x and 3.x.
ThreadLocal Context support which giving you access to the Context in page constructors.
New Control event methods, onInit(), onRender() and onDestroy().
Lots more code examples and design patterns on click-examples.
Performance improvements.

Since RC3 there have been a couple of important bug fixes:

Fixes:

Updated Cayenne controls to support Cayenne version 3.0.
Fixed CayenneForm save() method inserting multiple new entries bug. This issue was raised and fixed Tore Halset [307].
Fixed Table invalid handling params bug. This issue was raised and fixed by Satoshi Takata [308].
Fixed DateField readonly JavaScript bug. This issue was raised by Tore Halset [309].
Fixed DateField Dutch Calendar translation. This issue was raised by Harry Wissiak [310].
Fixed DateField $imports usage JavaScript bug. This issue was raised by Itou Akihiro [311].
Fixed bug where charset encoding being set after request parameters are read. This issue was raised and fixed by Ricardo Lecheta [312].
Fixed ThreadLocal Context forwarding bug on Jetty 5.1.*. This issue was raised by Ricardo Lecheta [314].
Fixed 'script.aculo.us' Ajax.Autocompleter bug with IE. This issue was raised by Itou Akihiro [322].
Fixed CompressionServletResponseWrapper NPE bugs on WebSphere and Jetty. This issue was raised by Ricardo Lecheta [323].

Enjoy.

The Click team.

Click 1.4.-RC3 released: now with stateful page support

2008-02-06T01:10:00.000-08:00

Click1.4-RC3 has been released today. Below are the related links:

Click is a page and component oriented Java web framework. Pages are mostly developed in Java, while rendering is performed by Velocity or JSP.
A lot of thought went into making Click as simple as possible and developers should be up and running within a day.

Since RC2 there have been a number of new features and important bug fixes.

Improvements:

1. Pages can now be stateful:

public class MyPage extends Page {

public Form form = new Form("myForm");

public MyPage() {
setStateful(true); // Page will be persisted between requests.
form.add(new TextField("search-term");
form.add(new Submit("submit"));
}
...
}

More documentation on stateful pages can be found here.

2. Added a PerformanceFilter to significantly improve the performance of Click applications. The filter is based on Yahoo's Exceptional Performance best practices for speeding up your web site. This filter combined with framework changes enable Click applications to get an Grade A rating with Yahoo's Firefox plugin: YSlow.

Also in this release:

Added new AJAX AutoCompleteTextField which provides Google suggest style lookups.
Added new Table CSS class styles: blue1, blue2, orange1, orange2
Fixed Form.copyFrom() to align with special Map handling of Form.copyTo(). [278].
Fixed Form submit check to handle multiple forms per page. [279].
Fixed exception when using Form.onSecurtyCheck in a stateful form. This issue was raised by Joel Schmidt [267].
Fixed PickList multiple selection bug. This issue was raised by Ricardo Lecheta [280].
Fixed Context leak under heavy usage. [282].
Fixed Page automapping bug. This issue was raised by Sep and Ricardo Lecheta [277, 294].
Fixed Linux ResourceBundle classloading bug. This issue was raised by Victor [293].
Fixed Tree encodeURL bug. This issue was identified by Thomas Bernhard [301].
Fixed Table memory allocation bug for large paged rowLists. This issue was identified by Naoki Takezoe [305].

For a complete list of changes visit the roadmap and changes.

Enjoy.

The Click team.