[Developers] New Acre release (r18)

[Jason Douglas]

We just pushed a new release of Acre, our hosted environment for  
developing Freebase apps and services.

	http://freebaseapps.com/


Some highlights of the release:


Short URLs
=========
You can now register a short http://*.freebaseapps.com URL for your  
app in addition to the http://*.username.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/  
URL your app was given when you created it.  Registering this "release  
URL" means your app will also be listed in the up-coming App Directory  
(soon!).  To register a release URL for your app, go to the new  
Versions tab of the app menu.


App Versions
===========
While there's much to love about the live editing nature of Acre...  
it's not without it's downsides.  How do you share your app with  
people without having to worry about breaking it as soon as you resume  
development?

To address this problem, we've introduced a new versions feature.   
Versions are addressable snapshots in time of an Acre app.  You create  
a new version of the current state of your app just by giving it a  
label.  That label can then be used in URLs to always refer to that  
app as of that moment in time, e.g.:

	http://label.appname.username.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/

Note that it's only the top-level app that is frozen in time.  If your  
app refers to files in other apps, they do not inherit the same  
timestamp.  (If you're adventurous, you can try out the new versioned  
acre.require -- there's now a second argument for the label -- but it  
hasn't been thoroughly tested yet.)

In addition, any version can be mapped to the app's release URL if  
you've registered one.  So you can create a version, set it as the  
released version, and then continue developing.  Once you're at a new  
safe point, you can the create another new version, update it as the  
released version, and your users should be seamlessly upgraded.


New Debug Console
=================
We've made a shift in this release to sending logs back down in HTTP  
headers (when the x-acre-enable-log request header is present in the  
request).  This change should be transparent other than the fact that  
the web-based console is now triggered by the presence of an  
'acre.console=1' query arg instead of the '/acre/preview' path prefix  
we used to use.


console.log to Firebug with FirePHP
============================
The switch to header-based logging also now enables the use of the  
FirePHP (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6149) Firefox  
extension with Acre apps.  If you can live with the PHP formatting,  
this is a great debugging tool as you'll see all of your console.log  
statements for every single Acre request... including AJAX requests  
and POSTs.


New App Editor Design
==================
To accommodate all of these new features (and a few more coming soon),  
we've redesigned the App Editor.  The redesign better surfaces the  
most commonly-used editor functions as buttons while still showing  
more code.  We also got feedback that having the App and File menus  
next to each other was confusing, so the App menu is now separate and  
triggered by clicking on the app name in the header.  There are many  
more improvements too, like IE7 and IE8 support... so just check it  
out for yourself.


New Code Editor
=============
We've also upgraded the version of the CodeMirror (http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/ 
) library that we use for editing.  In addition to fixing a number of  
bugs, the current line will now be remembered between file switches.   
Indentation is also no longer forced.  So:
	* Tab key now shifts a line to the right rather than re-setting  
indentation
	* Highlighting a section and pressing tab shifts the whole section
	* To re-indent a selection, press shift-cmd-i on a Mac and shift-ctrl- 
i on a PC.


Acre API updates
==============
* acre.freebase.img_thumb(id, height, width, mode, errorid) has two  
new arguments: mode and errorid.  Mode takes any of 'fit', 'fill',  
'fillcrop' and 'fillcropmid', while 'errorid' is the ID of the  
placeholder image to use if an image is not found.
* acre.form_url(base_url, dict).  This is a new helper API that will  
take a base URL and append a serialized Javascript dictionary as a  
query string to it.  This is basically the reverse of  
acre.environ.params.


Acre API Reference & Code Search
============================
We're experimenting with a new API browser (much more current and easy  
to browse, but still lacking some detail), as well as making all Acre  
scripts searchable so you can find example uses of different APIs.   
You can try out both from the Help menu in App Editor or directly at http://api.freebaseapps.com/ 
  and http://codesearch.freebaseapps.com/.


Faster JSON parsing
================
All of our JSON parsing used to be done in Javascript, which for large  
requests (like, say... a big mqlread :-) could get quite slow.  In  
this release, we've switched to a native Java JSON parser which is  
much faster.


-- the Acre team