Our working plan for Instant Developer Foundation 21.5 included providing concrete answers to requests from developers in our Community.
We’ve accomplished this by implementing a substantial number of updates, improvements, and changes: this time there are well over 100.
But there’s more… So Apple turned up with its fall release of the new version of its mobile OS? No problem! With Foundation 21.5 you can simply recompile to update your apps to iOS15.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the new items.
The importance of the Community
For Instant Developer 21.5 we’ve selected requests from the many channels that our Production Department monitors assiduously. In particular, I’m talking about the Instant Developer Forum, the reports deriving from the tickets that our Instant Developer Support Team handles, and the proposals submitted directly through the Customer Area and in our Together collaboration system.
The selection process helped us identify and implement over 100 suggestions, which is definitely a significant added value for an intermediate release, ready to use right away.
For example, one update makes application debugging faster and simpler. The toolbar in the debug module in Foundation 21.5 now features a new button that can reload the list of requests without needing to reload the entire debug form. This makes debugging easier, especially in cases when you need to interact with the application form as well as the debug form to monitor the behavior of web applications.
Leaving the programmer to focus on the logic of the application and avoiding needless wastes of time is one of the core principles of the Instant Developer philosophy. And in each release we add more tiles of varying sizes to the mosaic of this fundamental idea.
In Foundation 21.5, one of the many improvements in this vein concerns the Phase and Reason parameters of the BeforeSave and OnValidate events. In previous versions, these parameters were whole numbers, and the programmer needed to remember the possible values by opening the documentation. Now, value lists have been introduced that make it easier to identify the possible statuses and make the code easier to read. Simple but very effective!
One equally effective tile in terms of simplifying the programmer’s job is the new ability to obtain the number of rows found in the for-each-row cycles. This way, for example, it’s easier to show the user a progress bar in the event of lengthy operations.
For us, security is crucial. And we’ve focused on this aspect again in release 21.5, updating the .NET driver for PostgreSQL, which Instant Developer distributes automatically and copies into the Bin folder of the application if it uses one or more PostgreSQL databases. The new version of the driver supports a new, more secure authentication method that is included in version 13 of PostgreSQL and activated by default when installing the database.
Update to Apple iOS 15
A new release of an operating system or a browser is a legitimate reason for concern for programmers (the ones who don’t use Instant Developer).
We are perfectly aware of this, because one of the other founding principles on which we base our work is to shield programmers who develop applications with Instant Developer against the problems created by breaking changes.
We all know them, but we don’t want you to have to worry about them. That’s why, even though it was only released a few weeks ago, iOS 15 is already supported in Foundation 21.5. Even the template that Instant Developer Foundation uses to create packages for Apple devices has been aligned with the most recent version of XCode.
So all you need to do is install the new release and recompile your iOS apps to guard against any issues, small or large, that your users might experience.
The Web Editor with an extra gear
Of all the many updates in the main release (21.0) of Instant Developer Foundation, one of the ones we paid the most attention to was the introduction of the Web IDE.
A change of perspective that was enthusiastically received, even if implementation wasn’t yet complete. This obviously allowed developers to use the Web Editor mostly to run tests. Thanks to the feedback we got through the channels I mentioned before, we learned that it was a good idea to complete the Web Editor in a different way than we had announced.
By different I mean expanding the usage options available to developers by fully capitalizing on the power of our system. The result of this change of plan, the goal of which is in fact to produce a markedly better result than the initial design would have done, will not see the light in this intermediate release as originally anticipated. Instead, it will be part of a nice surprise we want to give you in a few months with Foundation 22.0.
There is still a lot in this release that there’s no room to discuss here, but we’ve truly accomplished so much (and it has been so rewarding).
To find out more, read the release notes.
Enjoy!
