Hello,
It's been a while since the release of 1.6.2 and, after a well
deserved vacation, the time has come to look to what the future brings
to FlexXB. I'm curently working on v1.7 which will bring some highly
anticipated features...
The first one will be circular reference handling, such as JaxB
provides; take a look here for more detais:
https://jaxb.dev.java.net/guide/Mapping_cyclic_references_to_XML.html.
This is a big one and I hope I'll get it right in a reasonable amount
of time :D.
A variant on this feature would be the ability to be able to only
specify the id of a reference in your class, like this post explains:
http://groups.google.ro/group/flexxb/browse_thread/thread/14630a80cd87db24?hl=ro.
FlexXB 1.7 will allow for more ways of notifying objects of various
processing steps (preserialize, predeserialize, postserialize,
postdeserialize). The regular, event based system will still be
available, in addition you will be able to implement some interfaces
that will make your methods get calles when specific events happen,
rather than going through the regular method.
I'm also planning a refactoring of the way FLexXB is linked with a
model object cache. These two entities are too higly coupled and there
is no way to, for example, say "I don't want caching" or "I want a
cache provider that does things diferently". In 1.7 the two entities
will be less coupled and you will be able to opt for a no cache
approach or use existing cache providers or even write your own. This
is a pretty powerful feature as it paves the way for many interesting
means of caching the objects.
As always, some fixes wil be included, and I'm talking now about an
issue with default namespaces, when you get some aaa prefixed
namespaces in xml children (
http://code.google.com/p/flexxb/issues/
detail?id=29) . I'll probably release a 1.6.3 version with this fix
only because I can see how problematic this bug can become especially
when you need to comply to namespacing rules. I'll see about that in
the next few days and will let you know.
I guess that's all for now. If you have comments or suggestions or
proposals for new features I'll be happy to hear them.
Have a good one,
Alex