IWebMvc M2 available: Lots of goodies

It's been less than a month since the preview release of IWebMvc but a lot of things have been added to the platform and I thought it was a good moment to release a new version. I will label it as Milestone 2. In case that you didn't try the first one I've created a short presentation of the framework possibilities. It's the fastest way to get your feet wet with IWebMvc and an interesting reading nonetheless. You can obtain it from the project download page.

And to the topic! This new version packs lots of new functionalities so I'm going to just list them and provide some info (remember that the best way to understand everything is downloading and checking for yourself!):

• Environment features
  
  • Additional supported configurations
    In addition to embedded Jetty, IWebMvc can now be run in Tomcat and/or Glassfish (or any other JEE5 compliant AS really). IWebMvc will autodetect the deployment server and apply some custom configuration.
  • Per server configuration
    IWebMvc transaction management can be configured in pretty much any way you like. It offers examples to be easily deployed in different environments: Database pools, full JTA, Spring JPA, driver manager connections, JOTM, with or without JNDI, ...
  • IDE integration
    This version provides Netbeans 6 / Eclipse Europa project files for easy workspace setup.
  • MySQL support
    IWebMvc will accept MySQL (in addition to HSQLDB) as database back end.
  • Installation guide
    In addition to Jetty demo, IWebMvc includes now complete installation instructions to run it in the several supported configurations.
  • Cache & compression filters
    All content served will include HTTP cache headers and will be compressed using gzip, improving performance and saving bandwidth.
  • IE 7 preliminary support
    There are still minor glitches (mainly with file management) but 90% of the features already work.
• Hibernate features
  
  • Full Text Search
    In addition to filters, IWebMvc can look up entities searching in all indexed fields.
  • Completely revamped Filter functionality
    Easier to include and more powerful.
  • Support for lazy initialized collections
    Views can wok with uninitialized collections transparently.
• DWR features
  
  • Classpath scanning
    DWR will scan the classpath looking for suitable beans (those annotated with @RemoteProxy) and create automatic proxies for them.
  • New DWR read store
    Built from scratch dojo data read store. Tested support for FilteringSelect and/or Grid widgets.
• dojo features
  
  • Upgraded to version 1.1 beta 3
    All client code has been migrated to the latest available developing version of dojo (final release of 1.1 expected this month).
  • Theme support
    User can change the appearance at any time. All three (Soria, Tundra, Nihilo) themes from dojo are available. Custom themes can be added with little effort.
  • Entity Locator widget
    Domain entities can be binded using a powerful search widget (in addition to preexistent combobox widget).
  • Video widget
    New video component supporting Flash (.flv) archives
  • Thumbnail widget
    Server side on the fly creation of thumbnails for any image.
  • Grid widget
    In addition to PagingGrid, classical dojo grids are now available
  • List widget
    Any List<DomainEntity> can be created / updated transparently. All binding and validation is automatic as well. A specific tag wrapper and client component have also been created. Other collection widgets can be easily derived from this one.
  • Refactored client code
    Most of JS code has been refactored out of the widgets to a common file to improve performance and maintainability.

In fact, there are more features present but I'll left them undescribed for now. Of course, this version packs dozens of bug fixes as well. But better see it by yourself! So I have to encourage everybody to go to the dowload page and give it a try. Or by checking out the latest sources (svn export http://internna.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/IWebMvc IWebMvc). As always comments, suggestions, contributions, requests are very welcomed using the mailing list. And expect many more new features coming soon :-)