Witango 5 for Windows Release Announced at Internet World NY
At Internet World in New York, New Creation Consulting (a North American Distributor) officially announced on behalf of With Enterprise the release of Witango 5 for Windows. Witango 5 for Windows will be available for purchase through resellers and the Witango web site (www.witango.com) from Friday the 4th of October.
There have been substantial changes to the internal workings of the Witango Application Server to optimise the performance and stability of the server as well as new features and meta tags added. A "What's New in Witango 5" manual will be available for download when the installers are posted to the site on Friday 4th October.
The major changed features in the Witango Application Server 5.0 are as follows:
- The threading model has been extensively updated. Witango App Server5 now runs in full pre-emptive multitasking mode;
- mail integration supporting POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP as well as international character sets in message text, MIME encoding, file attachments and custom mail headers;
- The client interface to the App Server has been opened up exposing a C++ and Java interface to enable integration of non-web interfaces to the Witango App Server, eg SOAP, XML-RPC, etc;
- The debugging facilities have been enhanced to assist application developers when developing their sites. In particular, Witango App Server 5 exposes the full meta stack trace that identifies errors in code to a line in an action of a taf. This allow developers to quickly and easily trace errors in nested meta tags;
- The error reporting options have been expanded to allow developers more control on error messages and associated help text;
- The variable handling functionality has been optimised to improve performance of applications, and, to encourage typing of variables by developers.
Witango 5 for OS X will remain in beta while a few OS issues are resolved. We expect the release of this platform to be before the end of October. The FileMaker version of Witango 5 and Witango 5 on the Linux platform will go into public beta in 2 weeks.
A few things to note if you do not like reading manuals.
- Local scope has be changed to request scope. This describe more accurately the life of the variable. Local scope has been kept as an alias to request scope to ensure backward compatability. The version 5 Dev Studio uses Request scope with all actions instead of Local scope and will therefore produce code that is not fully compatible with a Tango 2000 server. This can be worked around by opening your taf and tcf files in a text editor and replacing request with local in the actions.
- Request and method scope have been optimised for speed and they will operate faster than shared scopes
- Quote your parameter values, especially if they are string values
- The server settings now have the default scope set to request. If you do not scope your variables, (we recommend that you do), you will need to change this setting in the witango.ini file to user.
- The httpheader config variable does not function the same way as Tango 2000. You will now need to send complete http headers, not partial header like Tango 2000 allowed. There are 2 new tags to assist you in formulating http headers - @HTTPREASONPHRASE and @HTTPRESPONSECODE
- TCF objects now operate in shared scopes without crashing the server.
- If you experience a Witango Server crashes on Windows 2000, the crash will be logged to the witangoevents.log file. The logging will identify the TAF and action that was executing when the server crashed. It is vital that these types of issues are reported back to our support team via the bug tracking facilities of the developer site.
- Scope your variables always. This make more robust code and takes load of the server as it does not have to search the different scopes for the variable name.
