
itools 0.15.0 (2006/12/20)
==========================

itools is a Python library, it groups a number of packages into a single
meta-package for easier development and deployment:

  itools.catalog        itools.http             itools.uri
  itools.cms            itools.i18n             itools.vfs
  itools.csv            itools.ical             itools.web
  itools.datatypes      itools.rss              itools.workflow
  itools.gettext        itools.schemas          itools.xhtml
  itools.handlers       itools.stl              itools.xliff
  itools.html           itools.tmx              itools.xml

The template language STL has seen the most important change since its
inception. A new method for variable substitution has been implemented,
it replaces "stl:attributes" and "stl:content". To illustrate this change,
while before we wrote:

  <a stl:attributes="href object_uri" stl:content="object_title" />

Now we will write:

  <a href="${object_uri}">${object_title}</a>
  
This new approach produces more compact and readable templates. It will
also make easier to build some user interfaces. And will help translators
since the messages extracted from the templates will be more easy to read.


This release is also the first to include some C code. We have rewritten
the XML parser ("itools.xml.parser") in C for performance. The programming
interface is mostly the same (see the UGRADE.txt file for the incompatible
changes).

For those who wonder... Why yet-another-xml-parser? Because its programming
interface is much much simpler (that means better) than the parsers based
in back-calls. See the itools documentation to know more [1].


The other big changes in this release are in "itools.cms", one is for
disk usage, the other is functional.

The code that implements transactions has been rewritten. From a brute
force technique we have moved to a refined one that takes advantage of
the extensibility of the "itools.vfs" layer. The visibile change is that
we don't need anymore a backup database, so the size of an instance has
been reduced to (almost) the half.

The functional change has to do with user management. Now we use the
email address to identify users, instead of a username. The user must
confirm the registration sending an email, this way the application
can be certain the email address is valid.


There have been also some smaller improvements to the programming
interface of other packages, most notably "itools.vfs", "itools.catalog",
"itools.web" and "itools.cms". See the file UPGRADE.txt file for the
incompatible changes.


[1] http://download.ikaaro.org/doc/itools/itools.html


Credits:

 - Hervé Cauwelier wrote the new database code and made other important
   changes in "itools.cms" (metadata stored roles);
 - J. David Ibáñez did almost everything else;
 - Norman Khine helped testing.


Resources
---------

Download
http://download.ikaaro.org/itools/itools-0.15.0.tar.gz

Home
http://www.ikaaro.org/itools

Mailing list
http://mail.ikaaro.org/mailman/listinfo/itools

Bug Tracker
http://bugs.ikaaro.org/

