We are thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Codename One 3.0!
To celebrate this release we are giving away a $100 rebate discount for annual pro
subscriptions and $300 rebate discount for annual enterprise subscriptions.
All you need to do to get this rebate is signup for an annual subscription and the appropriate sum will
be refunded within 24 hours thru PayPal. This offer is valid before June 1st 2015.
You can check out the press release and full announcement here.
Go a head and update your Plugin now to get the new Release.
Highlights Of The Release – Click For Details
New iOS VM
When Codename One debuted we used XMLVM as the underlying iOS virtual
machine abstraction. XMLVM is an excellent product but its unmaintained and its goals are too different from the
goals of Codename One. The new VM includes some features that would be remarkably hard to achieve with XMLVM
such as: proper stack traces, faster builds (2x overall!), smaller code size, concurrent GC, deep OS binding (String – NSString relationship) etc.
Read more about this work on
the announcement blog.
JavaScript build target (technology preview)
Allows compiling Codename One applications to JavaScript client side webapps
without server side code. Notice that this support includes threading support.
Notice that this feature will be restricted to enterprise developers once it enters beta.
The Java VM work is based on
TeaVM an OSS Java-JavaScript VM.
Read more about this work in this blog post.
Charts API
The charts API supports drawing a wide range of charts such as bar, pie, line etc. It supports animating
charts and is based on the aChartEngine Android API.
Read more about this work on
Steve’s blog post.
New Demos
- Property Cross – Browse properties for sale in the UK using a JSON webservice. Shows off JSON webservices, InfiniteScroll, URLImage etc.
- Dr Sbaitso – Demonstrates an AI bubble chat interface, includes text to speech using native interface and more.
- Photoshare – A simple social networking app that allows sharing photos
- Charts – Demonstrates all chart types
- Geoviz – Performs statistic analysis over US population based on locale specific data
- Flickr – Demo for the Toolbar class showing special title area effects
New Themes
New beautiful and functional themes are now available through the plugins and
the designer tool.
Toolbar API
More advanced and highly customizable API for handling
the title area. It allows adding search to the title, animating its appearance/folding, placing commands
arbitrarily and using the side menu.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
URLImage
Simplified image download to an icon or preview,
that allows to implicitly apply special effects to said image (e.g. round corners, scaling etc.).
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
Built demos into the Eclipse/NetBeans Plugins
The main Codename One demos are now built-into the plugin so you can try them immediately without
fixing classpaths and without downloading additional software.
New Android graphics pipeline
We rewrote the graphics pipeline on Android to work better in Android 4.x+ and use hardware acceleration
where applicable. This new pipeline also includes support for the Shape & transform API’s.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
Regular expression and validation support
We added a new regular expression package and a new validation framework that simplifies
error highlighting for input. As part of that work we also presented a rudimentary masked
input UI.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
High DPI Image Support
There are 3 new DPI levels in Codename One all of which are now supported by the designer:
DENSITY_560, DENSITY_2HD & DENSITY_4K.
Support for opening HTML files with hierarchies & Tar support
The builtin HTML support was improved by providing a way to open a hierarchy of files and not just
a self contained HTML file. As part of this improvement we also added support to the tar file format.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
New Morph & Flip Transitions
The
morph transition was inspired by the Material design UI, converting a component on one form to
a component on another form. The
flip transition provides an impressive 3d effect thats trivial to apply
to any form or transition.
InteractionDialog
A new “modless” dialog that can “float” on top of the
UI using the layered pane capability of the parent form
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
Significantly enhanced developer guide
We redid the developer guide from the ground up converting
it to asciidoc and integrating it into the website in a more fluent way. We increased its breadth by over
50%.
Check it our
here or download the
pdf.
iOS Beta Test Support (testflight)
Apple introduced a new way to test mobile applications for up to 1000 beta testers based on the testflight
framework (but not to be confused with the old testflightapp.com product). We now support distributing
apps via this process for pro users.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
MiG layout support
MiG layout is one of the popular cross platform Java layout managers that works across FX, Swing, AWT
and now on Codename One as well…
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
Facebook improvements such as publish support & version 2.0 API
Facebook made a lot of changes to its API such as requiring a special
publish permission
and migrating graph calls to version 2.0. Both are now integrated into Codename One.
Added webservice wizard to simplify client-server calls
Support for badging the native OS icon on iOS
We now support updating and setting a badge on an app icons in iOS devices.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
TCP socket support
We finally added support for TCP sockets into Codename One.
Read more about this work on
this blog post.
Advanced keyboard input in iOS that doesn’t fold implicitly
This is an implementation of a feature that was
requested
quite a while back. Historically, when moving from one text field to the next the VKB would fold and reopen. We now allow you to seamlessly
move between input fields.
You can also read the far more detailed list of release notes here.
One of the things we are announcing today is a switch to faster release cycles, we already announced the
next two release dates which will probably map to versions 3.1 and 3.2 respectively: July 27th and October 27 2015.
Notice that the dates are 3 months apart allowing us to make releases much faster and keep Codename One
stable in shorter iterations. This effectively means that
versioned builds
will become a more viable feature. It also means that the feature list for every release will be very volatile
and we won’t announce them until the release is out of the door.
Warning For Users Of The Old VM (XMLVM)
If you are still using the build flag ios.newVM=false we strongly suggest you stop right now!
Even if you don’t need appstore submission and aren’t worried about the impending July cutoff date for the old
VM you would still need to migrate!
Apple broke xcode 5.x builds with its new Mac OS release Yosemite, this has been broken for a while and it
seems that Apple has no intention of fixing this. Unfortunately Apple has a tendency of tying xcode upgrades and
OS upgrades together, our build servers are still running Mavericks (the previous OS X release) and we have
no intention of upgrading them right now. However, if we find ourselves in need of a new server or if Apple
forces us to use a new version of xcode (and thus a newer version of Mac OS) we would be forced to upgrade
the servers.
Such an upgrade will make all builds targeting XMLVM fail!
The correct thing to do is move to the new VM which we are actively supporting as much as possible, we suggest
you do it now rather than hastily at a later date. It provides many advantages including stack traces & a
superior gc.
1 Comment
Fantastic news. Well done to the CN1 team!