Alpaca Release 1.1.1
The Alpaca project team is pleased to announce the release of Alpaca 1.1.1.
What is Alpaca?
Alpaca is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a core engine and a control library to let you change form layouts, plug in validation logic and adjust form presentation with simple changes to JSON.
Alpaca is the web forms engine for Cloud CMS. It can be used within your own standalone projects. It is free to use without restriction within both non-commercial and commerical applications.
Download
To download the latest release of Alpaca, visit http://www.alpacajs.org. We make available distributions with all of the source code and examples.
Or you can visit our GitHub project, pull the source and build it yourself:
https://github.com/gitana/alpaca
What's New?
This release introduces several new features and bug fixes.
Added Preview of Alpaca Designer
Alpaca Designer provides drag-and-drop form building plus real-time testing of different combinations of JSON Schema and options configurations within a unified visual client. Alpaca includes the designer along with the source code for the forms engine itself. Our aspiration, going forward, is that the designer will provide a foundation implementation that others can extend and contribute to for use within their own projects.
Default Field Values
Alpaca fields now handle default or unassigned values more appropriately. The JSON is effectively thinned out by removing any values that need not be expressed based on their default and required attributes.
Improved Error Handling
The "error" handler passed into the Alpaca constructor is now properly chained down to child field so that downstream errors propagate back up and find the intended handler. The default error handler is still resorted to for non-render chain errors.
Documentation + Example updates for jQuery/jQuery UI dependent fields
Several of the Alpaca fields that depend on jQuery or jQuery UI (such as the WYSIWYG, DatePicker and DateTimePicker) now have improved documentation to indicate these dependencies. They also feature better examples of how to pass in configuration to customize the underlying dependent controls.
File Field selection handling
The File Field now lets you specify a "selectionHandler" function. If provided and if the HTML5 File API is available, the selection handler will be invoked when a file is selected within the form for upload (but before clicking submit). This allows for inline thumbnails and other uses as shown in the new example for the file field.
Simpler Web Site + Resources
The Alpaca Web Site navigation was cleaned up a bit and simplified. A few broken links were fixed. And a resources page was added to help people find tools and future addons.
Get Involved
We encourage our community to download and try out the 1.1.1 release. For all active projects, we encourage developers to upgrade to the 1.1.1 release for all the latest bug fixes and updates.
For code-level information on what has changed, please check the commit log.
We invite everyone to get involved. Alpaca is a community-led project and benefits greatly from community code fixes, patches, issues and feedback. Want to add a feature? Found a bug? Feel free to fork the code and submit a pull-request. Or submit an issue and ask the community what they think. We're building Alpaca for you and would love to have your contributions.