Blogs

Forgot to include this screencast in my last post where I go through the new features. What you can’t see in the video is all my nervous sweating, which is a good thing.

Included in the 2008 Q3 release of CUI is a brand spankin’ new version of Calendar! We’ve put in loads of new features to really improve the usefulness of the component. I’ll go over some of my favourite features.

Multi Month
Using the new monthrows and monthcolumns attributes, you can render as many months you want!

Quick Nav
Another useful feature is the quick nav panel which allows you to jump to any month/year without having to go month to month. To activate the quick nav panel, you just need to click on the title of the calendar.

Natural Language Dates
For the attributes that require you to specify a date (selecteddate, mindate, maxdate, etc.), you can use some natural language dates. The following are accepted:

• today
• yesterday
• tomorrow
• last week
• next week
• last month
• next month
• last year
• next year

Databound Events
Another neat new feature is the ability to define event information for a date. You can define a url that will return event information for a date as an xml document. You can use our server side libraries to help you with this (just like with Grid). You can also define custom disabled dates in this way.

Themes
Our designer extraordinaire, Yohei Shimomae, has put together some sweet new themes for the Calendar. Loads of ‘em too!

And that’s just a small taste! There are a total of 14 new themes!

Ok, so that’s just a few of the new features. Q3 will be available to download July 17, 2008. Live samples of the new Calendar will be up then as well.

A while back we partnered with Gigline Software to create JSF components based on our Complete UI suite. So to coincide with JavaOne, we have a preview build available to download (and by we, I mean Eric from Gigline. Great job!): Preview Release with live samples hosted at Gigline: http://giglinesoftware.com/NitobiJSFWeb

This preview release already has some nifty features. All the Nitobi JSF tags support value exressions on all attributes (save for the id attribute). Also, all the javascript and css files are bundled in the jar and will be loaded by the component automatically. Plus, there is a JSF tag for the Callout component allowing you to declaratively bind a Callout panel to a DOM element.

This is but a taste of things to come. Here’s what we’re trying to get into the final build, due for our forthcoming Q3 release:

• Make all data-dependent components able to populate through managed beans.
• Create a phase listener for all data-dependent components to handle parameters and simplify a bit.
• Get the rest of the components JSF compatible (including the new Tree Grid component).
• Short hand JSF tags that will allow developers to combine existing components together, without the need to muck about with javascript.

So for you JSF devs out there, give it go and let us know what you think!