XBLinJS 0.4 Released

XBLinJS 0.4 is released now.

The promised "interesting widget" turned out to be a conversion of a Javascript Shell from elsewhere on the net; see the demo page, at the bottom.

The main point of this release, aside from the aforementioned Javascript Console, is the big internal changes in the release. Be sure to read the CHANGELOG.

One of the side effects of this big change is that XBLinJS can now actually be used as a replacement for XBL; see the Advanced Uses page.

This is probably the last release for a while, unless I get some kind of feedback, because I am going to turn my attentions back to my Iron Lute project, and start a new job in the near future. How much this library changes will depend on feedback or if I quickly start using the new library in my new job.

The next major feature, aside from continuing to port interesting widgets and libraries from the net, will likely be support for better graceful degradation. At the moment, XBLinJS assumes you know the user will have Javascript, that they will turn it on, and that it can construct entirely new widgets from scratch. The next major feature is to add the ability for Widgets to bind to already-existing HTML nodes, and proceed to add event handlers or even add more DOM nodes, which will enable you to create XBLinJS-based widgets that still gracefully degrade if Javascript is off; for instance, you could create a map display widget that enables client-side scrolling or something as Google does, but still works like old-style maps by clicking on the image to re-load the page if the user doesn't have Javascript available. This will make XBLinJS more attractive for use with sites available to the general public.

If anyone wants this feature sooner rather than later, or would like to work on implementing it, contact me and I'm sure we can work something out.