Portofino 4.2 released!

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Alessio Stalla

Portofino 4.2 released

REST support and an improved user interface make Portofino better than ever!

To all our dear users and followers, we are very happy to announce the release of the awaited version 4.2 of Portofino! More than 30 issues were addressed, in the biggest update yet since Portofino 4.1. The framework is doing well as downloads continue to increase, traffic on the lists is steady, and new customers ask us for specific developments and vertical solutions alike. This new version testifies our continuing dedication to the support and evolution of Portofino!

The most important feature introduced with Portofino 4.2 is REST support. Whereas, until now, Portofino has always been focused primarily at building user interfaces, while web services were somehow second-class citizen, you can now turn any Portofino page into a web API using standard JAX-RS annotations. CRUD pages natively come with GET, PUT, POST and UPDATE methods that expose all of the fundamental Search, Create, Read, Update and Delete functionality as JSON over HTTP methods, protected with the usual permissions, of course. This enables all sorts of exciting new uses of Portofino as a provider of web APIs to be used in mobile applications, mashups, integrations with third-party systems and tools, etc. Existing pages need not to be changed to activate the new functionality - you get it for free!

Also, the user interface has been improved with better looks, a stronger use of AJAX and greater care towards accessibility, while remaining firmly based on Bootstrap 3. Portofino has never been so pretty! Particular attention has been directed towards new users who shouldn't feel lost after running the wizard, thanks to pointers to the documentation and to official community channels, as well as a new series of example pages that complement those generated by the wizard and show a glimpse of what you can achieve with Portofino.

Another important change is the modularization of portofino-model.xml. Until now, the monolithic portofino-model.xml has been a pain to maintain in big applications with many developers; a single, huge XML file which is formatted and ordered differently depending on the JVM/OS combination is not VCS-friendly at all and breaks easily with concurrent modifications. Starting from this version, each table has its own XML file. You don't have to change anything - the first time you save the model from Portofino, it will be updated to the new format!

You'll also find some new page types and examples to showcase what's possible with Portofino.

Bug fixes and small improvements. As usual, there are always little and not so little things to fix and improve! Look at the issue tracker for details.

Migration guide

To migrate from Portofino 4.1.3 or 4.1.2, you only need to review your /theme/head.jsp file. Portofino now pulls JS and CSS dependencies from webjars, so a few paths have changed. The standard head.jsp is included in the distribution you download from SourceForge, as well as in projects created from the Maven archetype.

To migrate from older versions, read the release notes for each version found in this blog and follow their directions.

Note that a few previously deprecated methods have been removed in this version. Be sure to test your application thoroughly!

Go get it!

Download Portofino 4.2 from SourceForge or grab it from Maven Central and have fun! If you have issues or suggestions, please come to our community forums.

If you need support, we have various standard options, or you can contact us and ask! Our customers are usually very satisfied :)