Really Simple History 0.6 countdown: Bug fixes, SVN repo, mailing list, downloads, more

Brian Dillard, Monday, October 29, 2007 @ 5:27 am

Lots more news on Really Simple History, the open-source Ajax bookmarking library I'm now spearheading:

• SVN - RHS now has a Subversion repository. The version trail starts with the 0.6 beta. Since its release, I've been committing bug fixes and refinements as I get them tested. Feel free to check out a read-only copy if you're already bored with the beta.
• Mailing list: I've also started a Google Group for the project. In the future, that will become the primary means of communication for RHS, and I'll get back to other subjects here on Agile Ajax.
• Bug fix: for/in loops - It's universally acknowledged that they're considered harmful, but I unthinkingly added one to the codebase just before zipping up and publishing the 0.6 release. That's now remedied in SVN.
• Bug fix: Safari - The initial 0.6 beta also had a major shortcoming in its Safari 2/Mac implementation. Bookmarking worked great as long as you didn't navigate away from your RSH-enabled app and then come back. If you did, goodbye, history. It turns out that the history.length hack fails in these circumstances because the browser resets the value each time the page loads. My solution was to add yet another hidden form field and store the initial history.length value there the first time the app loads during a session. Upon subsequent loads, I grab the value from this field instead of from history.length. Hacks upon hacks upon hacks, but it works.
• Enhancement: test page - I've continued to refine the test page. It's now got a single logging console instead of three separate ones, plus easier-to-read log messages and more user-friendly controls.
• Download archive - I've created a bunch of for-posterity-only downloads of Brad Neuberg's original versions 0.1 through 0.4. It seemed a little silly to create a retroactive SVN trail for them.

As of this writing, 225+ people have downloaded 0.6 beta. That's in addition to the 2150+ people who have downloaded the stable 0.4 release in just the six weeks that it's been hosted at Google Code. It's really hitting me how many people actually use this thing, which spurred me to spend my weekend on the tasks listed above. I'm working hard to address the following additional issues before putting out a non-beta release:

• Bug fix: Safari infinite loading bug - I want to get rid of the stupid, eternally spinning disc on my RSH Safari tab. The fix is out there in the world; I just need to implement it.
• Bug fix: Opera history dies when you navigate away and back - I licked this in Safari, so now on to Opera.
• Bug fix: IE user-typed history entries - RSH 0.4 handled these properly, but I broke something in 0.6. It's a corner case, but I'd hate to undo Brad's hard work to handle it.
• Enhancement: window.onunload - RSH has always clobbered previously defined onunload handlers. In this era of memory leaks and the onunload events that help plug them, I want to handle this more gracefully.
• Enhancement: JSON bridging - The standard JSON library I'm shipping with RSH doesn't play well with Prototype. I need to provide a better mechanism than brute force for individual users to override these methods with their own JSON serializer and stringifier.
• Enhancement: Graceful failure - I want to add better user-agent detection and set a global flag to just turn RSH off for those user-agents that aren't supported. Right now, for instance, the library thinks Safari works, period, when really only Safari 2/Mac works perfectly.

I'm pretty confident I can get most of this committed this week. If you're an RSH user, please let me know if there's anything I'm overlooking.

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• ajax
• javascript
• bookmarking
• Really Simple History

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