RSF 0.7.3RC1 in repositories - please test!

[Antranig Basman]

I have just closed the last JIRA (of 68) for the RSF 0.7.3 release,
which is expected later this week.

http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF/fixforversion/10160

The release candidate 0.7.3RC1 is now is now available in the
 CARET Maven 2 Development repository at http://www2.caret.cam.ac.uk/maven2dev/
 as well as the Sakai Maven 2 repository at https://source.sakaiproject.org/maven2/

(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.

It would be appreciated if any RSF users could spare the time to
check out this candidate and report any releases - I have 
checked over a couple of tools in trunk (page order helper and
blog wow) which work fine (with a small update for blogwow).

The most important developer-facing issues with this release are the
more stringent validation of component trees and view parameters
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-39
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-94
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-50
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-23

These may in some cases cause apps which formerly worked to
fail with a (hopefully helpful) diagnostic. RSF-39 has been 
particularly useful in catching some errors within the 
framework samples and almost always represents a developer
error. In general for this release, you will need to be more
"formal" about attaching components to their position in 
the tree in a proper order, taking care that none will
"dangle" or become circularly connected.

An important issue for Sakai users is 
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/jira/browse/RSF-112
 - the sakai-util.jar, which was previously an indirect concrete
JAR dependency passed on from SakaiRSF itself, is now no longer
required. This should make it easier to build and deploy Sakai
RSF apps in "non-standard" or vendor drop situations without
running into version conflicts. 

The client-side renderer is coming along well, having been cleared
for running in IE6. In general at and after 0.7.3 towards the RSF
0.8 release, we will start to see releases of "RSF Client" becoming
more decoupled from those of "RSF Server" as the relationship with
Fluid becomes clarified.

Cheers,
Antranig.