Announcing Apache Pivot 1.5

I am happy to announce the release of Apache Pivot 1.5! Apache Pivot (http://pivot.apache.org) is a platform for building rich Internet applications (RIAs) in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform.

Pivot 1.5 includes a number of improvements intended to help improve the overall application development experience:

• Significantly improved data binding

  Data binding is now supported across a much larger collection of components and properties. In addition, a BindType enum was added to allow a caller to control the bind direction (either load, store, or both).

• New pub/sub API

  A publisher/subscriber API was added to the ApplicationContext class to facilitate decoupled messaging within a Pivot application.

• New SuggestionPopup component

  Pivot 1.5 includes a new component that simplifies the task of adding "auto-complete" or "lookup" functionality to a TextInput. This component can also be used to provide "combo box"-like behavior in an application.

  See the Suggestion Popups section of the Pivot tutorial for an example.

• Form improvements

  The Form component in Pivot 1.4 and earlier releases wasn't quite as usable as it could have been. This component has been completely overhauled in Pivot 1.5 - flagged fields are much more prominent, and flag icons are now more consistent with the overall Pivot L&F.

  See the Forms section of the Pivot tutorial for an example.

• Text rendering improvements

  The appearance of text drawn by Pivot components is now much more consistent with natively rendered text.

• Bindable improvements

  The Bindable interface is used to simplify the integration of WTKX and Java code in a Pivot application. While this interface was included in Pivot 1.4, it lacked the ability to provide the caller with access to the resource bundle used to load the WTKX file. A Resources argument was added to the initialize() method for Pivot 1.5.

• Minor L&F enhancements

  Push button-like components (PushButton, ListButton, CalendarButton, etc.) are now drawn with slightly rounded corners, as are tab buttons. The tab button bevel is also now more consistent with other buttons.

• Streamlined query servlet API

  The QueryServlet API is now more consistent with web query client API, making it easier to write Pivot applications that provide and take advantage of REST-based web services.

• ResultList

  A new class, org.apache.pivot.sql.ResultList, was added to simplify the task of returning JDBC result data from a web query. This class can be used to transform SQL a result set into a JSON or CSV response without the need for any intermediary transformation - the data is transformed on the fly as it is read from the database.

• FileSerializer

  A new serializer was added to simplify the task of writing file upload applications in Pivot.

Pivot 1.5 also includes a number of bug fixes and other minor enhancements, and is recommended for all Pivot users. Complete release notes are available here. Pivot 1.5 can be downloaded from the Pivot home page.

Thanks to all who contributed to this release!