Today we just pushed out our release candidate for WebSharper 3.0. This means that WebSharper 3.0 is now in feature freeze, and we will only be releasing bug fixes until the stable release of WebSharper. So if you were holding out on switching to 3.0 because of continuous breaking changes, now is the time to try it out!

WebSharper 3.0-rc1 is available for download right now.

We also made large enhancements to the online documentation; check out the sections on Sitelets, HTML combinators, WIG and UI.Next. More will be coming until the stable release.

Change log

Here is the list of changes:

• Homogenize WebSharper.Html.Client, WebSharper.Html.Server and WebSharper.UI.Next.Html: the HTML combinators are now generated from a list of standard HTML tag names and attributes, to ensure consistency between the client and server libraries.

• #337: Exception when building WebSharper itself in debug mode.

• Html.Client:

  • Mouse and keyboard events have an Event field to access the underlying Dom.Event.
  • Add OnEvent to bind a custom event by name.

• UI.Next:

  • Doc now implements WebSharper.Web.IControlBody. This means that it can be used directly as the Body of a Web.Control:

  type MyControl() =
      inherit Web.Control()
  
      [<JavaScript>]
      override this.Body =
          let rvText = Var.Create ""
          Doc.Concat [
              Doc.Input rvText
              Label [] [Doc.TextView rvText.View]
          ]
          :> _
  

• JQuery:

  • Make the types of .on(), .off() and .one() more consistent with other event handlers such as .click(), passing the element and the event to the callback and returning the JQuery:

  JQuery.Of("#my-input")
      .On("paste", fun el ev ->
          JS.Alert ("Text pasted, value is now: " + JQuery.Of(el).Val()))
      .Ignore
  

  • Add Event.AsDomEvent.
  • Fix JQuery.GetJSON inline.

• WebSharper.JavaScript:

  • More accurate Dom.Event class hierarchy.
  • #206: Add JS.Prompt().
  • #356: Move |>! from WebSharper.JavaScript to WebSharper, as it can be useful in some server-side scenarios.

• Sitelets:

  • #327: Allow using all standard integer, float and decimal types in Sitelet.Infer.
  • #355: Fix Sitelet.Embed deadlock.
  • #357: In JSON deserialization, null can be used to represent None.
  • #363: Fix Template.LoadFrequency.WhenChanged.

• Remoting:

  • #361: Show a warning when using a synchronous [<Rpc>] function.
  • #362: Throw an error when an [<Rpc>] function has a generic type.

• WIG:

  • Removed access modifiers, as only public makes sense in a WIG definition anyway.
  • Deprecated Type.New(). It was mainly used for two purposes:
    • Self-reference: you can use TSelf instead.
    • Mutually recursive types: the recommended way is to name classes first and add members later:

  let Chicken' = Class "Chicken"
  let Egg =
      Class "Egg"
      |+> Instance [
          "hatch" => T<unit> ^-> Chicken'
      ]
  let Chicken =
      Chicken'
      |+> Instance [
          "lay" => T<unit> ^-> Egg
      ]
  

  • Added Pattern.RequiredFields, Pattern.OptionalFields and Pattern.ObsoleteFields to create configuration objects in a more compositional way:

  // Existing Pattern.Config:
  let MyConfig : Class =		     
      Pattern.Config "classname" {
          Required =        
          [		
              "name", T<string>	
          ]
          Optional = 
          [		
              "width", T<int>	
              "height", T<int>	
          ]
      }
  
  // New API:
  let MyConfig : Class =
      Class "classname"
      |+> Pattern.RequiredFields [
          "name", T<string>
      ]
      |+> Pattern.OptionalFields [
          "width", T<int>
          "height", T<int>
      ]
  

Future plans

This release candidate means that the 3.0 stable will be coming soon. In fact, unless a big issue holds us up, we will be releasing WebSharper 3.0 as early as next week.

After that, here is a peek at what you can expect from future releases:

• TypeScript declarations: we will be stabilizing the support for outputting .d.ts declarations for generated JavaScript modules, which was an experimental feature so far.
• F# 4.0 support: as soon as F# 4.0 is finalized, we will provide proxies for the extended standard library.
• Source mapping: we will improve the support for source maps, in particular reduce the need for many-to-many mapping which several browsers have trouble with.

Happy coding!