[Developers] [BULK] Announcing Acre dev/20

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

The Acre development team is proud to announce the release of Acre 
dev/20, which we consider the first 'release candidate' for Acre 1.0.

This release introduces a considerable amount of improvements in both 
the app editor and in the Acre engine itself.



APIs cleanup and deprecation
-----------------------------

Acre APIs have grown organically, starting by emulating a simple 
CGI-like model. Over time, we realized that a request/response model was 
better suited for Acre apps.

This Acre release marks the deprecation of the old CGI-like model (for 
example, acre.environ.* and acre.context.*) and the official 
introduction of the new request/response objects (acre.request.* and 
acre.response.*) which are now the recommended way to interact with the 
HTTP request/response life cycle.

It is important to note that even if deprecated, all APIs are still 
available and will remain available for a few more releases: we 
understand that back-incompatible API transitions are highly disruptive 
and we want to minimize the impact we're having on our community of 
developers. At the same time, we want to avoid disruption later and this 
is why we're doing this transition now, before a 1.0 release.

It is worth noting that while Acre will execute apps that use deprecated 
APIs unchanged, it will also log 'warning' deprecation messages in the 
console (which can be obtained by adding setting the "acre.console=1" 
parameter in every URL served by Acre).

We highly recommend following those deprecation warnings to update your 
apps to the new APIs, so that your app will continue to function in the 
future once the deprecated APIs will be turned off.

The new documentation hub (mentioned below) shows which API methods and 
variables have been deprecated and what are the new ones that should be 
used.



App Directory and Documentation Hub
---------------------------------

Acre now has two important new visible parts: the app directory and the 
documentation hub.

o) the app directory is the place for browsing and searching for apps. 
When you release an app to a short url it will be automatically added to 
the directory.  You can edit its description, or even de-list it, in the 
General tab of the app menu (click on your app's name) in the App 
Editor. Find the app gallery at

     http://freebaseapps.com/apps


o) the documentation hub is the place where you can find information 
about all the Acre APIs, the Freebase APIs and web services, the MQL 
language, etc. It's still a work in-progress, but we're also excited to 
introduce a new documentation viewer that brings together all of our 
reference documentation -- for Acre, MQL and the Freebase Web Services. 
  It's both available in App Editor from the help menu, as well as 
stand-alone at:

     http://freebaseapps.com/docs



App Editor
----------

Several important improvements were made in Acre's app editor:

o) new query editor: guides you thru the creation of a MQL query with 
context-based auto-completion. It will also generate a simple acre 
template to generate an HTML page from your query and get you going faster.

The keyboard shortcut for invoking "query assist" is the Tab key.

o) code completion: app editor is now is capable of providing 
code-completion functionality and guide you during app development thru 
the discovery of Acre's API and its parameters.

The keyboard shortcut for invoking "code assist" is Alt-Space on the Mac 
and Ctrl-Space on other platforms. Code assist also shows up 
automatically after you type a period after "acre".

o) improved app selection menu: makes it easier to move from one app to 
another with the list of most recently used apps.

o) console goodies: the log console now has a link to the source code of 
the page being executed and a breakdown of the 'costs' of executing the 
request (useful for profiling).

o) no more extra blank lines inserted while cutting and pasting code 
inside app editor.

o) files are now automatically saved when previewing.

NOTE: if you see some weird behavior of the app editor, try 'shift 
reload'-ing it as some browsers are pretty aggressive with caching parts 
of the application.


Engine
------

- allow ${} substitutions in <script> and <style> tags

- error pages have links back to the originating source line

- shift-reload now always returns fresh values


                                 - o -


For more information on all the bugs fixed in this release, you can look 
at the issue tracker change log
 
https://bugs.freebase.com/browse/ACRE?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:changelog-panel


Happy Acre coding!


-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                              Application Catalyst
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.                      stefano at metaweb.com
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