I'm pleased to announce a preview of the next generation of SiteMesh.
Before I go on, here's a big disclaimer: This is not a stable release
version yet... it's not even a beta... it's an alpha... a first alpha.
But anyway, I decided to launch it in this state, as I think it's a huge
improvement over SiteMesh 2, and I'd like to get your feedback earlier so it
can be fed into the final product.
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Quick links, for the impatient:
* What's new? http://www.sitemesh.org/new-in-sitemesh3.html
* Download: http://github.com/sitemesh/sitemesh3/downloads
* Getting started: http://www.sitemesh.org/getting-started.html
* Feedback: http://groups.google.com/group/sitemesh3-users
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So what's new? Well, everything. The 10 year old code base has been thrown
away and rebuilt from the ground up. At the core of it is a new content
processing architecture that performs roughly three times as fast as
SiteMesh 2 with half the memory usage.
Along with that:
* Decorator chaining. Compose pages from multiple layouts and decorators.
* Decoupled from templating systems. Decorators can be produced with any
technologies - you are free from JSP.
* Offline site generation. Apply decorators as part of a build step.
Accessible through Java API, Ant task and command line tool.
* Simplified configuration. Use XML, Java or plug in your own system.
* Clean API provides extension points for adding custom processing rules
(e.g. on the fly page transformations).
* Relicensed under Apache Software License v2.0.
So what's the same? The values of SiteMesh have not changed - simplicity,
robustness and performance.
You can learn more about SiteMesh 3 on its new website:
http://www.sitemesh.org/
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What about compatibility with SiteMesh 2?
This was a hard decision to make, but SiteMesh 3 is not backwards compatible
with SiteMesh 2. Upgrading will require work beyond just upgrading a
library. Over the coming weeks, I shall produce some guides and tools to
make this transition easier. Though this may be frustrating to many users,
it was becoming too hard to make changes to SiteMesh 2 based on limitations
to its design. SiteMesh 3 addresses these and will make way for a lot of
great features and improvements in years to come.
Meanwhile, SiteMesh 2 will continue to be supported until 2011 - though this
will mostly be critical bug fixes only. The majority of development effort
will be focussed on SiteMesh 3.
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So give it a go, and give us feedback. But please remember that it's only an
alpha!
thanks
-Joe and the SiteMesh 3 team.
