A lot of internal changes were made in the ABMaterial 3.20 ‘Chipmunk’ release. For example, ABMContainer has been rewritten from the ground-up, but with minimal impact to your existing projects. It allows adding them as array components, and has much shorter ID tags in the generated HTML.
Mindful and Stanmiller had another go on the cache issues. They came up with a very nice solution (I had tears in my eyes) and both have done extensive testing on this subject. A big thanks again! ABM 3.20 is backwards compatible with the previous 3.0.3 Cache System, but I would advice you to make the changes whenever you have the chance.
A nice new feature for mobile devices is the New Debug feature using a modified version of Conzole!
New Debug at work:
Using this new feature is very simple in B4J:
First, you have to enable the console in BuildPage():
' params are: open on load, width page.DebugConsoleEnable(True, 300)
Two methods can be used to show or hide the console programmaticaly. Can be handy as a buid-in tool in your apps where the user enters a code on his device and you can then check the console.
page.DebugConsoleShow page.DebugConsoleHide
Now you can start doing some cool stuff 🙂 Some examples:
Show some text, or a server value (note: strings must be between single quotes!)
page.DebugConsoleLog("'Server click at: " & DateTime.Time(DateTime.Now) & "'") ' shows the text
Now I generated an error on purpose, so the demo can show it catches the error:
page.DebugConsoleLog("'value: ' + $('#pi002-r2c1').html();") ' generates an error, the ; at the end is wrong
Same code, but with the correct javascript syntax, showing the html() value of the tag:
page.DebugConsoleLog("'value: ' + $('#pi002-r2c1').html()") ' generates the html value of the pi002-r2c1 tag
It works also on the desktop, although you probably will use the Chrome console as you can do more.
But there is more. You can also redirect all browser console message directly into the B4J log window! You can use the following commands anywhere in your own code to start/stop receiving the browser console messages.
page.DebugConsoleB4JStart page.DebugConsoleB4JStop
This is a very powerful feature if you develop Webapps for mobile devices. It can be done otherwise, but it is a pain in the a$$ to set it up. Now, you can easily debug it on your iPhone, iPad, Android or any other device.
ABMaterial 3.20 has over 20 new features and bug fixes. Following the same philosophy as B4X, the quick release cycle has proven to work very well for ABMaterial and its many users. Donators will receive their download mail shortly. The public version 3.03 can be downloaded from this blog too.
I’m also glad that with these releases, now everyone can work with ‘Chipmunk‘, and this does also mean the development cycle for ‘Butterfly‘ has ended.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for the support, hourless testing and inventive ideas you came up with in the last few years. You’ve made ABMaterial one hell of a WebApp Development Tool!
But we are not at the end! Far from it as I already have big ideas for the next releases.
Until then, happy programming!
Alwaysbusy
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