9.2 ECAP 1 Developer Builds now available...and a look at what's coming soon!

[Seth Berman]

Hello All,

Instantiations Early Customer Access Program (ECAP).

Instantiations would like to wish everyone a Happy Holiday season.
We wanted to be sure to get this very early preview release out before the new year...so here it is!

Incorporated in this is a set of 90+ enhancements and fixes.

See "Coming Soon!" below for information on what is coming up in the next ECAP.

There is a _CHANGELOG.txt that you can always refer to for a list of changes in the downloaded ECAP directory.
However, I usually like to highlight some of the changes here for all to see what we have been doing.

ECAP Build 420 has the following areas of change:

Unicode/CodePages

- New kernel-only dependent EsCodePageUtilities

- Refactored AbtCodePageUtilities to reuse behavior of new EsCodePageUtilities

- Allow Seaside WAFileLibrary to decide when and how to encode (UTF-8 for example) when deploying files

- Fix WAUrl class >> decodePercent: with characters decoding

- Ensure iconv() correct behavior in Unix 64 bits

SSL/Cryptography Enhancements

- LibreSSL Compatible

- Implemented DH/EC/DSA/RSA version-transparent getters and setters (In support of upcoming JSON Web Tokens)

- Implemented Probabilistic Signature Schemes (RSA-PSS)

- Added Server Name Indication (SNI) support

Sst Http Client:

- Support new HTTP methods PUT and DELETE and internal code cleanup and refactor

- Support for absolute and relative redirects (with config options allowRedirects and redirectCount)

- Integrated the new Server Name Indication (SNI) support.

- No longer appends explicit default ports to header host fields (RFC 2616 compliance)

Packaging:

- Reduced the packaging warnings in the base image from hundreds to only a few

- Implemented dynamic adapting packing rule on CorePI that uses static code analysis.

- Made Seaside packaging work out of the box

NeoCSV

- New CSV features and tests! (thanks to Sven Van Caekenberghe for this high-quality project)

CommonFileSystem

- Add #writeStreamDo: , #readStreamDo: and #readRriteStreamDo: family of methods to CfsPath

Portability and new Collection API

- Added ArrayedCollection class>>#new:withAll:

- Added KeyedCollection class >> newFromPairs:

- Added EsString #lines and #linesDo:

- Added protocol #join:, #joinTo: , #split:, #splitOn: etc to Collection classes

- Added Collection >> #contains: and String #capitalized

- Added BlockContextTemplate >> #timeToRun

- Added EsString class methods #cr , #lf and #crlf

Seaside

- Improve error handling (like WAInvalidUrlSyntaxError) in Seaside Sst adaptors

- Add logging ability to Seaside Sst adaptors

- Fix negative ScaledDecimal json serialization

- Remove map "Seaside RSS Examples" from Seaside XD feature

Foreign Function Calls

- Callout to C speedup by multiple factors depending on argument count

- Implemented custom memory pooling for argument/return values

  instead of malloc.

Graphics/Imaging Support

- 20x speedup in PNG reading (filterRow and blitting moved to C primitives)

- Implemented PNG Interlaced Frame Handlers

- Expose image and text capabilities to AbtPushButtonView

XD Environements (Cross-platform development)

- Code Assist adapted to XD browsers.  Will now use information from nested passive image.

Stack dump files (.sdf)

- Fixed regressions as a result of 64-bit compatibility

- SstDebugger now supports reading .sdf files

MonticelloImporter

- Set prerequisites before attempting to load

VA Smalltalk IOT - Raspberry PI on ARM processor

- Updated to use our latest ARM-based virtual machine 

COMING SOON!

Some great new features are on their way and should be available for our next ECAP release
- Full High-DPI support is just about ready

- A brand new IMAP client that implements over 20 RFCs and supports advanced features like SSL/TLS, Compression

  IDLE (aka Server Push), SASL-IR, ESEARCH, Sort/Thread, ACL, Enable, Namespaces, Quotas, non-synchronized literals
  MOVE, UIDPLUS, and more!

- JSON Web Tokens and full JOSE suite.

- PostgreSQL native low-level driver that exposes the complete capability of PostgreSQL is complete and we are about to adapt it to Abt Database layer (and Glorp)

- Brotli compression streams (useful for web content encodings)

- Additional  HTTP Client enhancements with more HTTP Verb support and auto-resolving responses (i.e. brotli content-encoding will use new BrotliReadStream to decode content automatically)

- Git support for VAST via Tonel format interchange.  This brings git friendly source code structure to VA Smalltalk. (thanks Mercap for sharing with us a first pass of the tonel writer)

[Joachim Tuchel]

This is an exciting list, guys!

I can't wait to get my hands on Postgres, IMAP, git and more. And I am glad to see a few bugs fixed that I was bitten by. It seems like 9.2 will not be any less exciting than 9.1 fo rme.

Thanks for you rhard work and support!

Joachim

[Norbert Schlemmer]

Hello Seth

a first test was successfully done, perfect!

Thanks for you and your team!

Regards,

Norbert