Introducing IT Mill Toolkit 5

Effortless web application development for Java-programmers.

Release notes version (beta)

Version of IT Mill Toolkit Release 5 is still in beta phase, meaning that the library should be considered unstable and is recommended for evaluation and early adoption. Also, any changes are possible, including API changes, before the stable release.

Important Changes

The release if IT Mill Toolkit includes new features and a number of fixed problems. You should also notice the changes that cause backward incompatibility with existing applications, mainly caused by the new support for multiple applications per page.

  • Support for multiple applications in the same browser window (already in 5.1.2). See WebContent/multiapp.html for an example on how to embed multiple applications.

    IMPORTANT! If you have embedded Toolkit Applications in a HTML page with earlier versions of IT Mill Toolkit, you must update the embedding page! Run the application separately, view the source code, and copy the loading code to your HTML page.

  • Support for Java Portlets. See the following dev.itmill.com wiki articles for details.
  • The root style identifier #itmill-ajax-window if IT Mill Toolkit applications has changed to style class .i-app. This change will affect all applications that match for the style identifier in the style sheets and the rules have to be updated to the new convention. This is part of the changes for supporting multiple applications per page.
  • To speed up the loading time of applications, the default theme has been collected into a single CSS file in WebContent/ITMILL/themes/default/styles.css, which is a compilation of the separate CSS files for different components. Custom themes must inherit this stylesheet with the import command:
    @import
      "../default/styles.css";
  • Google Web Toolkit (gwt) libraries have been updated to 1.4.62, giving improved support for IE6. This requires updating GWT libraries in classpath to the new versions, if (and only if) you are developing custom widgets. As a downside, the Hosted Mode Browser of GWT 1.4.62 on Linux platform is based on Gecco 1.7, see #1636 below.
  • The default theme for TabSheet has changed in a way that may cause incompatibility with custom styling. If you have problems, just ask on the forum.
  • Many bug fixes. See the ChangeLog below.

For up-to-date status of known problems, see the developer website dev.itmill.com.

Important known problems in

  • #1155 Uncompressing the installation package fails in Windows if using the default Zip uncompression. Uncompression gives (in Windows Vista) an error message about too long filenames, and a more obscure message in other versions of Windows. Workaround: use 7-Zip or some other good unzip program for Windows.
  • #1636 Incompatibility with some versions of Firefox and other browsers based on Gekko 1.7. For example, the hosted mode browser of Google Web Toolkit 1.4.62 (included in IT Mill Toolkit) does not work fully in Linux so the the new feature for having multiple applications per page is not possible. This is due to the new client-side loader code. For a workaround for loading multiple applications per page, use a static HTML loader page, see for example the multiapp.html demo page.

For other known problems, see open tickets at developer site dev.itmill.com.

Requirements

IT Mill Toolkit is available for the following operating systems:

  • Windows (see the Zip installation notice above)
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X Tiger (mac) or Leopard (leopard)
  • Other UNIX operating systems such as Sun Solaris using the Linux installation package.

IT Mill Toolkit supports the following browsers:

  • Mozilla Firefox releases 1.5, 2, and 3 (see notice above about Gecco 1.7).
  • Internet Explorer releases 6, 7, and 8.
  • Safari 3
  • Opera 9

There may be differences between the exact versions of the supported browsers that may cause incompatibility with applications made with IT Mill Toolkit.

The following browsers are not supported but have been found to work to a large degree:

  • Safari 2
  • iPhone
  • Galeon, Epiphany and other Gecco-based browsers (see notice about Gecco 1.7 above)
  • Nokia Internet Tablet N800 and N810 (ITOS 2008)

Nokia E-series phones with at least 128MB of memory have been known to work with older versions, but not with IT Mill Toolkit 5.2.0. Konqueror, the default browser in many Linux distributions, is known to have limited usability.

ChangeLog Between IT Mill Toolkit 5.1.2 and 5.2.0