Backbase 3.1 Released

Backbase has made their flagship product available for download.

What`s new in 3.1

More user interface controls

• Date picker
• Context menu
• Sidebar
• Custom select/combo boxes
• Charting components mix Flash with Ajax

Support for XPath 2.0

Backbase 3.1 now contains support for XPath 2.0:
XPath is used to select nodes in an HTML or XML documents, but also to
make calculations. It`s one of the most essential building blocks of
the Backbase software.

Variables

Client-side Variables can contain a single value, but also a
complete piece of XML or HTML. This is useful for a large variety of
cases, for example to cache a piece of XML for processing at a later
point in time: you specify this piece of XML with an XPath expression.
Responses from the server can also be loaded into a variable.

Improved Data binding

If you would like to load data into a user interface Control,
you have basically two options: transform the data on the server, or on
the client. Server-side transformation works as good as ever, but
version 3.1 has introduced improved client-side data binding. A server
can send pure XML to the client, which is then transformed with an XSLT
stylesheet. This is very similar to the XML data islands pattern as described on Ajaxpatterns.org.

Focus model

With the browser`s standard Form controls - such as input boxes
and buttons - you can use the Tab- and arrow keys to navigate. When you
start creating your own user interface controls - such as a tab control
- you need to implement keyboard navigation yourself. The Backbase
Focus model makes this much easier: you can add b:focusgroup and b:focusitems attributes and the Backbase engine takes care of the rest.

Mix JavaScript and BXML

As you probably know, Backbase uses tags to define Rich
Internet Applications: this is so-called declarative development. In
some cases you might have existing JavaScript code that you want to
integrate. For this scenario you can now seamlessly include JavaScript
code using the tag.

Improved Back/Forward support

Version 3.0 already supported the Back-button and bookmarking, but in this version we have improved it. All known limitations
are now solved, so we provide best of class support for the
back/forward button, bookmarking, page refresh and deeplinking. This
can be implemented with the tag.