IntraWeb XII News

IntraWeb XII News

A lot of new things were added to IntraWeb version 12.2.13

The first and probably the most important thing, besides XE3 support: New Async processing mechanism.

When the browser sends an AJAX request to your IntraWeb application, two things should happen:

1) Each changed control must be updated and trigger the associated OnAsync event.

2) Then, changed properties of controls should be sent back to the browser.

These two steps require lots of processing: Find the control associated with AJAX request parameters, trigger the associated events, find all controls that changed – during the OnAsync event, for instance, and then re-render those controls, sending it back to the browser. Up to version 12.2.12, we had various loops, iterating all component hierarchy, to find the associated components and controls. From version 12.2.13 we are using a much faster method: A hash table. This hash table is populated after form rendering and when there is a new request (Async or a full submit), it is much faster to find associated components. This idea and first implementation is due to TeamZed member Pete d’Oronzio for IntraWeb 10. We have changed it a little and now it is part of IntraWeb 12.

When you have LOTS of visual controls in one IntraWeb form, the speed gain should be significantly. We still have to do some benchmarking and publish the results, but the speed gain looks good 🙂

Another addition to IntraWeb 12.2.13 is a new button control named TIWGradButton. This is a new cross-browser button, with gradiend fill, rounder corners, text and box shadows, access keys (hot keys), hover and active colors, and more. All visual effects use CSS3 and nothing else. In fact, everything that IWGradButton does today, you can still accomplish using older IntraWeb versions plus external CSS files. But the most important thing here is that now you can have it in a RAD way, out of the box, without touching a single CSS file!

This is the new IWGradButton in design time. Object inspector shows the most important CSS properties:

Note that you have predefined ColorSchemes, and a nice button look out of the box. You have control over many rendering aspects of IWGradButton, including colors, borders, shadows and much more. The next figures show the same application running in FireFox, Chrome and Internet Explorer (Safari and Opera are also supported):

Please note that Internet Explorer doesn’t support a few things, including rounded border corners with gradient filling at the same time, but you may still have a consistent look and feel in different browsers. Also, your application (or IWForm) MUST use strict mode – not Quirks (you should set ServerController.DocType = <!DOCTYPE HTML>).

You may download and run this demo application here. The source code will also be published in our CodePlex demo repository.

All the new things added to IntraWeb 12.2.13 will also be available in the next IntraWeb XIV release.