We have been working hard on version 2.0.0 of Ra-Ajax and it is now publicly available for download. This release marks very exciting events and changes. Probably not the least of which is the switch of license from LGPL to GPL.

We have completely revamped the website design, to make it easy for visitors to find just what they need. We have a new infrastructure that will allow our existing users to get the most out of Ra-Ajax and new users to get up to speed quickly. Many changes and bug fixes were made since the last version to make Ra-Ajax even more reliable and rock-solid.

New Website and Infrastructure

The new website design is much cleaner and less noisy. Users can find information relevant to what they want quickly and without much hassle.

A core focal point for us with this new infrastructure was help and support. We wanted to make it as effortless and straightforward as we can for users to get help with Ra-Ajax.

Documentation and Tutorials

Ra-Ajax users can now, using the Docs page,  browse the entire list of reference documentations and tutorials available or filter them to quickly get what they want.

Upon clicking a specific tutorial or reference documentation, full details will be displayed:

A long with a fully functional and interactive sample, with source code:

Q&A Support System

We have developed an awesome support system based on questions and answers, analogous to stackoverflow.com. We believe such system is perfect for support,  you can ask/answer questions, add a question to your favorites, vote a question or an answer up/down, comment on answers, search questions and much more.

Users’ activity on this system will not go unrewarded. When you ask, answer and comment on questions you will get credit points. These ‘creds’ will give you visibility and credibility among the Ra-Ajax community members.

We believe that such Q&A system would be useful for others as well. So we decided to make it an open source project and released it at Google Code as GPL.

Daily Build of Ra-Ajax

If you have asked for a feature or a bug fix, you don’t need to wait for the next release to get it. You can get it as soon as it is available in our source code repository. Our daily build system will create a release at 01:00 am daily (Norway Local Time) as long as it finds changes in the repository since the last daily build. The most recent five daily builds will always be available at http://ra-ajax.org/daily and the file names will contain the revision numbers they correspond to.

Ra-Software is a Software Factory

If you are still struggling with Ra-Ajax, or even with your own project, we have options to provide further help. Ra-Software can provide extensive in-depth training for Ra-Ajax, ASP.NET and many other topics. We also offer consultancy services for Ra-Ajax where we provide hands-on help in your project development in general or relating to adopting Ra-Ajax in your existing projects.

Changes and Bug Fixes

Version 2.0.0 of Ra-Ajax took a lot of time and attention from us. The changes are huge to be contained in one blog post. But here are some highlights:

• New Behaviors:
  • BehaviorUnveiler, you can see it in action in our website menu. This Behavior can fade a Control into specified maximum opacity on mouse over, and fade it out to specified minimum opacity on mouse out.

• New Widgets:
  • We removed WindowLight and added a new, minimalistic and a more generic widget called WebPart.
  • Inspired by the iPhone/iPod UI, we created a SlidingMenu control.

• Dynamic JavaScript Inclusion, so no JavaScript file is loaded unless you absolutely need to use it.
• Nicer error and exception display.

You can check out the Ra-Ajax change log for full details.

A Taste of What Can be Done with Ra-Ajax

Our friend Dave Lazarow, from South Africa, is an enthusiastic user of Ra-Ajax. He was building a portal for retail stores using ASP.NET Ajax and later switched to Ra-Ajax. Dave was so thrilled with the performance and productivity gains he acquired from using Ra-Ajax that he decided to create a video demoing his portal application:

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