Again we go through the ritual of a new release.

We have been hearing "c++0x is just around the corner" for so many years now that it no longer sounds credible. However, chances are real that some of its goodness is already well supported by your compiler… and Wt !

While there is many things to like about this language revision, the feature I looked most forward to was lambdas. I need to say was, because it is there now, I’ve used it, and I was delighted !

Wt (the latest git version) now supports clang++.

This required remarkably little changes to Wt itself, a few bug fixes in llvm/clang with were quickly resolved with the excellent help from the clang++ team, and one workaround remaining for issue #6920. You will need the latest svn version of llvm and clang.

Initial profiling (using valgrind --tool=callgrind) also indicates that clang++ -O2 seems to optimize a bit better than g++ -O2. Not too shabby for such a young compiler !

We packaged new versions of our libraries.

Although Wt::Dbo (Wt’s ORM library) comes packaged together with Wt, so far there was not a real integration between the two, other than that Wt::Dbo provides support for types provided by Wt that are missing in the C++ standard library (WString, WDate and WDateTime).

We have now added (in git) a first integration between the View classes in Wt and data Models built around a database: QueryModel<Result> is a tabular data model which can be used to display data from a database Query<Result>.

This can be used to display data from a database using a View widget such as Wt’s new WTableView or a WCartesianChart.

We packaged new versions of our libraries.

So what’s new ?

We spent most of our time (just over a month since the last version) fixing bugs, inconsistencies and annoyances, but there are also some exciting additions.

Since Java is a garbage collected language, it is easy to forget that one can still leak memory.

After porting the simplechat example to Java (yes, we are adding support for server push in JWt), we were playing around with it and suspected a memory leak.

Since long, Wt embedded snippets of JavaScript code (e.g. used for implementing the layout managers) directly in the C++ source code as string literals. This was not very developer friendly, and it also did not allow for using a minifier to compress the JavaScript.

We have just released 3.1.1 versions of Wt and JWt. These releases are maintenance releases and provide mostly bug fixes and feature polishing.

Update 22/2 An MSVC build problem has bene fixed in the C++ package, the new package version is now wt-3.1.1b

We were invited to speak on Wt::Dbo and JWt at FOSDEM 2010. For all of you who could not come to Belgium, we have put the slides online.

FOSDEM 2010:

FOSDEM 2009:

Last years presentation on Wt for embedded systems is still a nice introduction to C++ Wt.