9/9/2007: Aegis Group is delighted to announce the release of FoxWeb 4 beta 1. FoxWeb 4 adds a lot of new and exciting features, including functionality that makes it easier to develop Ajax applications and to generate PDF files. You may read about FoxWeb 4 and download it for evaluation purposes at www.foxweb.com.
In addition to a large number of performance and compatibility improvements, FoxWeb 4 offers the following new features:
Support for Windows Vista
Several changes were required in many different areas in order to support Windows Vista and other newer versions of Windows.
Create AJAX Applications
The new fwJSON object makes it easier to develop AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) applications. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format, commonly used in AJAX development. New sample scripts illustrate the use of fwJSON in conjunction with client-side JavaScript code to facilitate simple AJAX functions.
PDF Creation and Distribution
The new fwPDF object makes it a snap to create and serve PDF files from your FoxWeb applications. It contains functionality that facilitates the translations of Postscript files to PDF format and takes care setting the HTTP headers required for transferring PDF files to Web browsers. New sample scripts illustrate this functionality.
Authentication Enhancements
The enhancements in this version give developers more control over authentication and make it easier to create elegant password-protected sites that vary their content and behavior, depending on the login status of each user.
- Added ability to instruct Auth.Authenticate to perform a silent authentication and return the result to the calling script. Can be used to present different content, depending on whether the user is logged in, or not.
- Added ability to pass userid and password as arguments to Auth.Authenticate. These arguments are used instead of any fields sent by the browser. This feature can be used to programmatically log users in after registration, without having them re-enter their userid and password.
- Added Auth.Result, Auth.FailedUserId and Auth.FailedPassword properties, which can be used in fw_exit.prg to perform custom actions in the case of unsuccessful login attempts, such as send email to the administrator, maintain an authentication failure log, lock user accounts for a period of time, etc.
Error Handling and Error Logging Improvements
Some of the enhancements in this area make it much easier for ASPs and other large organizations to keep separate error logs for each virtual host.
- Error log captures server name as a separate field. Can be used to filter errors by host name.
- Ability to write in separate error log tables, located in the program root of each virtual server. Can be used to filter errors by host name.
- User interface improvements in fwAdmin.fwx error log viewer.
- Ability to select an implementation-specific error log in fwAdmin.fwx.
- Error handler can return a status of "500 Server Error" instead of "200 OK".
- Error handler returns the robots noindex HTTP header to prevent indexing of error messages by search engines.
- Improved formatting of error message HTML output.
Miscellaneous Improvements
- Response.Clear does not only clear the output buffer, but also clears any unsent HTTP headers, such as the status, cookies and the content- type.
- Added Request.ScriptParams property, which is populated with the part of the URL that is after the script name, but before the query string. This can be useful for creating parameterized pages that are indexed by certain search engines that do not support query strings.
- Added Server.JSUnescape method.