We have made a lot of updates in Rich UI area in RBD 9.6. We added responsive design support into Rich UI by adding EGL bootstrap and ionic widget libraries from scratch. Apart from that, we also try to keep currency for the existing Rich UI support.
Support chromium render engine
In Rich UI visual editor, we support to select render engines as the underlying browser. As the browser market changes dramatically, some render engines are out of support or even dropped. For example, XULRunner 64bit was removed and Safari for windows was dropped that makes webkit render engine unsupported in windows. The detail of official supported render engine for eclipse can be found here. Take windows 64bit system as an example, the IE render engine has become the only supported render engine officially de facto. Moreover, the IE itself is already deprecated and replaced by edge. It is possible that in a recent future, IE render engine is also unsupported. Given this situation, a new render engine must be introduced. Chromium is an open source browser behind Google chrome browser which is now the most popular browser in the world. It is likely that we can rely on it for a long time.So we bring in the chromium as a render engine for visual editor. With chromium render engine, visual editor will become faster and more stable. Additionally, a much more modern JavaScript syntax will be supported in the visual editor that would make it possible to design and preview recent libraries like Angular. For more information on the render engines and limitations, see Setting preferences for Rich UI appearance.
Cordova tool update
In RBD 9.6, EGL Cordova library and tools are updated to 6.5.0. When we introduced EGL cordova, the Android project was built by eclipse Android development toolkit. But later, Android has moved to Android Studio. And it keeps changing the project structure and the SDK structure etc. Some of the changes are breaking changes that makes old version of cordova broken for Android. The update of Cordova tool makes it to work with Android studio. However, the Android is still on the way of evolving. So it is possible that the current cordova version become outdated.
DojoPaswordTextField widget
RBD v9.6 supports a new widget 'DojoPasswordTextField' to provide a unified look and feel for applications based on Dojo. Additionally, it supports more properties like placeHolder that the RUI PasswordTextField does not.
Widget projects version update
Since we have resolved many APARs for RUI, the RUI widget projects version are updated. The updated versions are
- For EGL widgets that are not based on Dojo: com.ibm.egl.rui_4.3.6
- For EGL Dojo widgets: com.ibm.egl.rui.dojo.widgets_2.4.0
- For EGL Dojo samples: com.ibm.egl.rui.dojo.samples_2.4.0
- For the local Dojo runtime access: com.ibm.egl.rui.dojo.runtime.local_1.15.0
- The dojo mobile widgets in use are updated to 1.5.1
Enjoy the updates.