RSF 0.7.3M2 in repositories - improvements to Data Views, fixes

[Antranig Basman]

A milestone release of the upcoming RSF 0.7.3 is now available in the
CARET Maven 2 Development repository at http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/maven2dev/
as well as the CARET Maven 1 repository at https://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/maven/
(check the http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/rsfwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=TrunkCode ) page
for more pointers.

See the 0.7.3M1 announcement at
http://fluidproject.org/pipermail/fluid-work/2008-March/001542.html
for general details on the features and goals of the 0.7.3 release.

This release is mainly devoted to bugfixes - for a progress JIRA view go
along to http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF/fixforversion/10160

Since 0.7.3M1 the primary improvement is in the coherence of Data Views, which dispense
non-templated data in JSON, XML or other custom formats. 
These now participate fully in the RSF request lifecycle, can be the
target of RSF POST operations and join in flows and session scopes, 
as well as being protected by security rules. A self-testing
"mini-application" is at 
https://saffron.caret.cam.ac.uk/svn/projects/RSFUtil/trunk/test/uk/org/ponder/rsf/test/data

and those interested can follow the feature development discussion with
James Marca on the RSF forums at http://ponder.org.uk/rsf/posts/list/0/251.page#1245

Another notable resolved JIRA relates to rendering of messages of varying
severities in custom styles:
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-72

As well as from the evaluation system, this was also a request, together with
sample markup and structure, received from the Georgia Tech mailtool team, in
the form of the estimable The Carl Hall.

Many other fixes in this release also relate to the proper routing and display
of user-directed messages.

The immediate focus of development work will now be on the client-side rendering
system for RSF templates, which was first previewed at 0.7.3M1. As well as 
rounding out the set of primitive RSF components on the client side, there
will be a demonstration of rendering the Fluid Reorderer control, as well as 
"direct bindings" of UI elements to a local (JSON-represented) model rather 
than to a form submission.

Over 2/3 of the so far 65 JIRAs for the overall 0.7.3 RSF release are now complete,
it is expected that we will run to 1 or so further milestone for the remaining
issues which are generally pretty minor, before RCs and release probably in May.
This will then clear the ground finally for "cool stuff" that will make RSF
considerably easier to use in the 0.8 release.

Cheers,
Antranig.