[Chameleon] Chameleon 2.0 Final Release

[Paul Spencer]

Chameleon 2.0 Release

This is the final release of Chameleon 2.0.  This marks the culmination 
of many months of effort by many people, both at DM Solutions Group and 
in the larger community of Chameleon users.  I won't thank anyone 
individually in case I miss someone, so a big thanks goes out to 
everyone ... you know who you are!

Downloads are available (or will be shortly) at 
http://chameleon.maptools.org/.for linux and Windows, and at 
http://www.maptools.org/ms4w for MS4W.

As a side note for those interested in Chameleon's performance, we 
recently had an opportunity to do some live stress testing.  Our Tsunami 
portal (http://www.mapsherpa.com/tsunami) was built using Chameleon (in 
only a few days) and quickly gathered a lot of attention.  After a brief 
panic (we've only used Chameleon for relatively low-traffic 
applications), we realized everything was holding up well.  Based on 
this experience and some load stress testing, we are now confident that 
Chameleon is reasonably suitable for moderately high-use applications 
(in the order of several thousand hits per hour).  There's still loads 
of stuff that could be optimized and streamlined, but even without these 
tweaks, the performance is pretty decent.

Chameleon Community Launched:

I would also like to announce the launching of a Chameleon community 
site to be hosted on MapTools.org and maintained by the community.  This 
site has been planned for a while, and it's finally here.  The site is 
built on TikiWiki technology and Liz Godwin is the official maintainer. 
  Liz will be granting user accounts and moderating the content.  DM 
Solutions Group will be contributing/monitoring content and forum 
discussions and reviewing the site for content that should make its way 
into the official documentation on a periodic basis.  We hope that 
having a community site that is run by community members will provide a 
non-threatening environment for users of all experience levels to 
cooperate, share ideas, and provide excellent feedback.  Thanks for all 
the hard work, Liz.

Documentation Updates:

The initial version of the widget documentation is now ready.  This 
includes "empty" documentation for all widgets and complete 
documentation for about 26 core widgets.  Even the empty documentation 
is useful, though, since it lists all the widget attributes, form 
variables, and JavaScript.  We'll continue working in the coming weeks 
to flesh out the documentation for most of the widgets that we use on a 
daily basis. These additions will be available through CVS and through 
point releases of the 2.0 series.

The widget documentation is available through the new Chameleon Help 
Viewer application.  This is available via a web browser by accessing 
the help folder of the chameleon installation, probably something like 
http://localhost/chameleon/help/.

The help viewer is styled on the JavaDoc help viewer.  This is our first 
aatempt and we have many new features planned (but no time to implement 
them for this release).  Eventually, all Chameleon documentation will be 
managed by and accessible through the help viewer.

You can access the HTML version of the help documentation directly in 
the html folder of the help application.  These HTML files are 
pre-generated from the XML files found in each of the widget 
directories.  Depending on your system configuration (specifically, if 
you have the php_xslt extension available), you may be viewing the HTML 
files or the source XML files through XSLT.  In general, it is not 
necessary to view the source XML files unless you are editing them.  If 
you do need to access the XML files, copy help.xml-dist to help.xml in 
chameleon/htdocs/help and set the

Finally, the release notes.  Not much has changed since the first 
Release Candidate, always a good sign that things are finally stable.

Changes

The documentation files were updated for the final release.  Also, the 
Installation Guide has been updated for Windows/IIS installations.

bug 911: MapDHTML
   added BORDERCOLOR and BORDERWIDTH attributes.

bug 374: sample_basic
   added a help page using the EmbeddedHelp widget under the Tools tab.

Bug Fixes

bug 890: ProjectionLabel
   removed strtoupper on widget class and widgetstyle so that they use 
the exact case provided by the user instead of forcing uppercase.

bug 900: chameleon.xml
   for the ms4w distribution, use mapserver 4.4 by default now

no bug: cwc_events.js
   added test on registered functions to ensure that parameters are not 
added twice to a function.

bug 920: Button.php
   fix problem with dynamically generated buttons if textbuttoncache is 
set to true.

no bug: drawmap.php
   removed a debug statument when drawing the keymap that was causing an 
invalid image to be returned to the browser in some cases.

bug 918: session.php
   removed a debug statement from the garbage collection function (_gc) 
that caused the garbage collection to fail on non-windows machines.

bug 889: MapSize and ContextSelector
   added a Label object to each widget for consistency.


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|Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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|Applications & Software Development                              |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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