Simon Chabot
April 09, 2021

CubicWeb Monthly news february/march 2021

It has been quite a time since the last public news ; we will try in the letter to summarize what we did during february and march 2021. During this period, we tried to fix issues, migrate a lot of our code base to latest version of CubicWeb. We also did some archeology ; we have been looking at all the old heads in CubicWeb's repository, and we have tried to rebase them on the latest public head. A lot of merge requests have been created and are still under review.

CubicWeb 3.30 is out!

We released Cubicweb 3.30 on march 16th. There are no “big” changes in this release. A lot of issues have been fixed, the documentation have been improved − a new tuto is coming ! − and a few new features have been implemented.

Here is an extract of the changelog:

  • it is now possible to use smtp authentification to send an email (#221)
  • required variables can be read from the environment (#85)
  • one can specify scripts attributes when using the add_js function (#210)
  • GROUP_CONCAT was not returning the expected results when NULL values were encountered (#109)
  • it is now possible not to drop table indexes when using the MassiveStore (#219)

One can find the full changelog on Cubicweb release page here.

Adding python types to RQL

In the past months, python types have progressively been included in RQL. This is a step forward to python types in CubicWeb itself.

A lot of work has been done, and there is still a lot of work to do. Adding types to RQL help us to simplify the refactorings. As RQL's API is not clearly defined, we will run CubicWeb's tests on each merge request of RQL, to make sure nothing breaks.

Separate Back and Front

For some time now, the trend has been towards a clear separation between front and back. We are adding more features to use React in the front.

CwClientLibJS, a library allowing to use rql in the browser. CwClientLibJS is now in version 1.1.0 and is able to generate query on entity state (see !20).

react-admin-cubicweb, new tools to generate admin pages. react-admin-cubicweb is still at an early stage but can display entity attribute and relation. It also allows edition as well. The version 0.3.0 has been released !

Release-new

Release-new is one of our latest utility to release new versions of our cubes. Assuming that you are using conventional commits, you should really like this tool to release new version of your cubes.

Release-new takes care to:

  • update the version of the cube in pkginfo.py
  • update the debian/control if there is one
  • update the changelog
  • create a new commit with theses changes
  • tag the commit

By default, it will try to guess if it is a major, minor or patch release (you can specify the release type if need be). The changelog will be updated and you will be able to edit it before the commit is done. The update of the changelog will be eased if you use conventionnal commit as your commit history will be dispatched in the appropriate sections. For instance, the last changelog of CubicWeb has been produced by this tool !

Docker images

During our last hackathon, a team worked on our CubicWeb Docker images. The code to generate them has been rewritten to be simpler. During this refactoring, we took care to generate docker images for minor versions of CubicWeb as well. Therefore, on https://hub.docker.com/r/logilab/cubicweb/tags you can find docker images for major and minor versions of CubicWeb with different versions of python, to suit your needs the best we can :)

See you next month!