Are you on Facebook? Then you sure don’t want to miss the new and shining P4A Facebook page!

Time for a new maintenance release for our beloved framework, here you’ve the complete changelog:

- P4A_Thumbnail_Generator now supports ie’s pjpeg extension
- a bug with P4A_I18N::_format() method was solved
(YYYY was changed to yyyy)
- P4A_Field::setYearRange() method was added to be able to
manage the year range in the datepicker
- 10px top padding was added to P4A_Fieldset
- jQuery::maskedinput 1.1.4 plugin was added
- P4A_Field::setInputMask() and getInputMask() methods were added,
check the code reference for usage
- popup template support for “top” zone was added
- P4A_Table’s caption (label) is now automatically traslated at run time
- P4A now triggers the “ontranslate” event, you can intercept it
(getting string/translation/istranslated parameters) to track
translations while developing your application
- a bug with P4A_Table’s label with IE6 was fixed
- P4A_Table’s navigation bar’s “go to page” label’s CSS was changed
so now it will remain on a single line
- a typo in P4A_DB_Source documentation was fixed
- a PHP warning was fixed in P4A_DB_Navigator
- more info were added in products_catalogue’s index.php file
- P4A_Mask::setRequiredField() and unsetRequiredField() methods
now check if the field exists before calling the addValidator()
otherwise show an error message

Download P4A 3.0.3

I’m taking a bit of time (before leaving for a week of pure holiday) to write some pages of the P4A manual.

After the latest post about P4A’s I18n I’m now working on the first mask page, containing documentation about building widgets, displaying them in the mask, using layout managers (frames, fieldsets, canvases, sheets) and using the field.

Work is nearly completed, I think I’ll finish it today and that will be great!

We still have a lot of parts that need documentation, you can find the list here, you know… your help would be really appreciated!

How translations work and how to create multilingual applications in P4A.

We’re not on holiday yet, time for a new minor release :-)

Changelog:

• a small change was done on P4A_Array_Source to enable the usage of empty array_sources without warnings
• tooltips are now automatically translated at rendering time
• P4A_DB_Source::saveRow() now reads pk values back from Zend_DB_Table::insert() gaining better functionality with auto increment primary keys
• jQuery UI was updated to 1.5.2
• a small bug with P4A_I18N::_normalize() method was solved
• p4a_focus_set() javascript function was reworked to avoid a javascript warning in firebug
• loading a P4A_Array_Source with a simple array of data now does not create the “0″ field anymore, it’s been renamed to “f0″ to avoid problems with some PHP configurations with numerical object properties

Download P4A 3.0.2

http://167.157.23.4/admision/
a credits line in the footer seems too much for them.

there are no contacts there, it seems the server owner is:
http://inti.faces.umss.edu.bo

if someone knows how to contact them, please let me know.

Changelog:

- a bug about session name was solved
- FCKEditor was updated to 2.6.2
- a bug with shadows CSS was solved (unused shadow.png file is not linked by screen.css anymore so we’ve no “file not found” in web server’s logs)
- P4A_Error_Handler() global function now uses the P4A::messageWarning() wrapper for P4A::message() solving a bug with the warning icon name that was changed in 3.0.0-rc5
- jQuery UI was updated to 1.5.1

For the first time p4a is also available as .deb package. We encourage all users of Debian based distros to test this new package and give us feedback.

Download P4A 3.0.1

It was a long long journey started on December 17th, 2007, with more than 800 commits it has really been an hard work but we’re proud to tell everybody that P4A 3.0 is finally released!

Thank you everybody contributed to this wonderful release!

I suggest you to check the official release notes, they’re full of useful info and… For who was waiting… commercial license is available too.

Note: the image at the top is just a humorous revisitation of P4A logo with some “300 the movie” effect :-) hope you enjoyed.

ExtJs is a great javascript development library, some time ago I did some tests to port P4A to ExtJs and I wrote a post with my considerations about it and other javascript libraries.

In that post I wrote:

ExtJs as really a killer graphic layout, and it’s released under LGPL3 (developers wrote some licensing notes that I can’t really understand… actually I think that those notes could conflict with LGPL3 itself)

Today I found a post by Matt Asay called “ExtJs: When open source is not open at all“.

A quote from that post:

It’s a bit like saying, “You can use this as open source so long as you use the software how we’d like you to use it. If you have any money, forget open source: pay us instead.”

So how is this open source? This is a wholesale rejection of the Open Source Definition (#6).

That’s a confirmation of my doubts about ExtJs licensing and a confirmation that we took the right choice not to use it for P4A at the moment.

Now, I always try to be constructive also when writing critics about a project so here there are some suggestions for the ExtJs team:

• clarify your licensing model, choose LGPL3 (or AGPL3 or whatever) definitively and remove your own notes (this will make ExtJs grow both within the final users market and the server-side market)
• open your SVN, it’s ugly for FLOSS developers not to be able to follow the development
• listen to user requests, when I wrote in the forums that there was no way to get a field’s label displayed if the field is not inside a form panel, the only answer I got (not from the team which didn’t answer at all, but from a premium member) was “buy a license and ask for that feature” [...]
• think general purpose because not all the users want to build all the application from javascript, ExtJs could do fireworks if it could be better combined with server-side frameworks

There would be so many things to tell… I’ve been working hard (sleep? what’s sleep?) on P4A 3, I was too excited about the new possibilities to wait, more info will come later.

Next week will be totally distructive but I hope I’ll be able to post something and code a bit.

And now… Dublin I’m coming for the weekend!!! :-D