Portofino 5.1.4 released

[Alessio Stalla]

Hello, community,

I hope you're all safe and well. We've just released Portofino 5.1.4, which is mostly a bugfix release, in which we've subtly improved the look and feel of the user interface. We advise upgrading your applications.

We've also made the first steps in two of the main areas that we'll receive most of our efforts in the coming months: documentation and microservices.

In fact, even if the Portofino Survey hasn't received a lot of answers yet, it's starting to confirm two trends that we'd previously identified:

• users tend to stick to Portofino 4, mostly because version 5 is poorly documented and harder to use;
• Portofino is still firmly placed and perceived as a tool for building full applications with a GUI, with all the limitations of an automatically generated GUI – while it's often overlooked that it also creates a REST API over a database, which is very easy to customize and extend.

So, in this release, we've added a new page to demo-tt, to serve as an example of a custom REST + UI implementation on top of Portofino; and we've done some preparatory work towards a microservices architecture, with an even greater focus on REST APIs and composability of services. As an experimental feature, we can now launch Portofino 5 applications without an external servlet container (Tomcat), because the generated .war file is executable with java -jar (using a piece of Spring Boot technology).

The detailed list of all the fixes and improvements is tracked in our changelog if you want to know more.

Binaries, API documentation, and source packages are hosted on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/portofino/files/manydesigns-portofino, while libraries are available from Maven Central and npm. Also, a Docker image for the Upstairs application is now available from Docker Hub.

Finally, on the GitHub wiki you can find:

• a quick Getting Started page for users that are new to Portofino.
• a little guide to upgrading from a previous version of Portofino 5.x
• a document detailing all the changes from Portofino 4 to Portofino 5.0 and some migration instructions from Portofino 4.

Enjoy and don't hesitate to provide feedback!

Going towards version 5.2, we'll work on the following areas:

• documenting common tasks with a few short videos
• simplifying the creation of custom pages, eliminating the need to learn TypeScript and Angular in simple cases
  
• microservices architecture with a stronger focus on APIs and integration.

Stay tuned!

Alessio

PS as a personal note, let me say that even if this is a tiny community, it's always been quite diverse, with people chiming in from all continents. I'm very happy of this fact. Let's try to keep this community a welcoming place for everyone, regardless of where they come from, what shape they have & who they love. If you have something to share about this, please let us know!