XVCL version 0.3

Released on February 1, 2001.

Documentation and examples

Documentation and examples have been the main focus of this release. XVCL now has three more demo programs illustrating use of the library for creating HTML applications. You can find the demo programs in the Demos directory of your XVCL installation.

There is also a new article available at the web site called Component-based web development with XVCL that walks you through the sample programs. This article should be a good starting point if you would like to try using XVCL for building Web applications.

HTML support

HTML support had been significantly improved in this version. New components incapsulating the following HTML elements had been implemented.

<head>
<title>
<body>
<label>
<fieldset>
<legend>
<?import?>

Several classes that incapsulate HTML attributes had been introduced.

TJvxHTMLInputTypeAttribute. This class allows using an enumerated type to specify the type of <input> element. Before you had to use strings, which was error prone.
TJvxHTMLScriptAttribute. This class is used for all attributes that contain script. It replaced TJvxProtectedStringAttribute, which was used before for this purpose.
TJvxHTMLURIAttribute. This class is used for all attributes that contain URIs. It replaced TJvxProtectedStringAttribute, which was used before for this purpose.

Internal changes

Code from JvxContainers was merged into JvxUtils. As of this version, JvxContainers no longer exists. This was done to refine unit naming. Since XVCL doesn't have and unlikely to have in the future any sort of library of container classes, we didn't feel like having JvxContainers unit is needed.
TJvxNodeStack class was removed since it is no longer used because the implementation of TJvxXMLGenerator, the only descendant of TJvxVisitor class was radically simplified. With new simpler design, there is no need for a node stack class anymore.

Debugging Memory Manager

Debugging memory manager was modified to allow compiling it directly into executable as well as using it as a shared DLL. Because of limitations of the debugger in Delphi, it is impossible to debug a shared memory manager DLL. The downside of the direct use of debugging memory manager is that you have to put GetMem.inc file from Delphi Source/Rtl/Sys directory somewhere on the search path of your projects.

Test Runner

Test runner is an important part of XVCL testing. XVCL has unit tests for testing all units, classes and global functions. Test runner is a simple form that allows running unit tests and displaying results on the screen. Unit test framework is built based on ideas of JUnit is available for you to use in your projects.

You can now specify whether you want Test Runner to break into debugger when an assertion failure occurs.
Test runner now write messages to Windows Debug Output log as well as displays them on screen.