Ample SDK

The main development focus in this release was on improving stability and features of the core module of the SDK - runtime. Multiple tweaks were applied across all UI languages implementations too. Almost a hundred issues and feature requests have been addressed in this version, thanks to community feedback and support. Amongst the highlights are a CSS3 transitions shim for IE6-9, a bind() function, Date now() shims, XUL observes and overlay elements, support for custom Event interfaces and XML processing instructions, content localization with @aml:content and @aml:values attributes, and more.

The major focus was on maturing the platform core. The runtime module is now used in multiple projects and commercial products. New features include implementation of the good parts of the jQuery API, a core localization service, a plugin infrastructure, support for IE9 and FF4, an HTML5 canvas element for IE6-8, and a guarded API. The UI elements registration API was simplified. The component-in-component implementation was re-visited. Multiple fixes were made to the SVG implementation for IE6-8. The XUL implementation was enhanced.

Touch events support was added. DragAndDrop and SPI History manager were adjusted to follow HTML5 APIs and behavior. New JavaScript 1.8 methods were added to the objects in browsers missing any. The readystatechange event and readyState property on document, the $abort method, setDragImage, and tabIndex support were added. The XHTML and XUL implementations were refactored. The WYSIWYG editor element was added. The color theme was tweaked. Bugs were fixed for ":not()" and ">" CSS selectors, the keydown event not being repeated in Opera, getBoundingClientRect, compareDocumentPosition, text selection while dragging, and SPI history manager in IE8.

This is a minor release. It includes many updates to the Core module, SVG, XUL, and Charts markup languages. Ample SDK was also tweaked to run on IE9 Preview. The W3C SVG 1.1 Full Test Suite was added, which should help further the maturing of the SVG implementation for IE8 and earlier. SVG "script" tag support was added. The "svg" tag onload event was implemented. The "event" parameter was changed to "evt" for SVG inline handlers. Multiple pseudo-class selectors in CSS were implemented, and the ":not" selector was fixed. Several XUL components were improved, such as wizard/dialog/window and tree/listview. The User-Agent HTTP header was changed to X-User-Agent.

A new JavaScript charts implementation with support for all major chart types such as Bar, Column, Line, Area, Radar, Doughnut, Bubble, Map, Pie, and Funnel styleable with CSS. A significantly improved SVG 1.1 implementation for Internet Explorer. Now transformations on all shapes and groups are properly working. The image tag and Fonts module have been fixed. There are multiple minor fixes related to color handling. Overall performance of the SVG renderer has been improved by some 10%. The SVG implementation has been tested against the W3C SVG 1.1 (Tiny) test suite.