Forum OpenACS Development: Some new features

1: Some new features

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/01/22 11:22 AM

Dear all,

some of you might be interested, what is happening in current development, and what new functionality will be included in OpenACS 5.10.1. Here are just two new features, we should probably communicate the new goodies better.

One new feature probably interesting to some of you is the client-side double click handling, which is important on large sites with some potentially slow requests.

One other new feature maybe interesting to site admins is the new filtering code of the request monitor (see below). When a site has e.g. a separate connection pool for bots, one is not so much interested in the slow handling for bots, but on the request queuing time for real users. Now, one can conveniently filter the long calls per request queue.

All the best
-g

2: Re: Some new features (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/01/22 04:13 PM

At the OpenACS conference in Vienna, there were requests to reconsider the public installation of api-doc. Since many years, all "Registered Users" got per default access to /api-doc. This is probably OK, when one assumes that the registered users are developers. However, providing source code access to all registered users can pose a security thread,
especially on large sites, with highly diverse users.

In the development version of OpenACS, this is addressed in two ways.

Firstly, for new installs, api-doc is now just accessible for site-wide admins.
Secondly, the user-interface for package permissions (link used e.g. in site-maps) was reworked to make it easier to modify the permissions on packages. See below for the new interface. This change is certainly relevant for all packages.

3: Re: Some new features (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/01/22 04:44 PM

One of the other noticeable differences is the improved support for Bootstrap 5, using adp:icon as presented at the OpenACS conference. These generic icons are used intensively on the main packages to provide a consistent appearance.

Many of the (site-wide) admin pages were overworked to provide a more modern look-and-feel. See a few examples below.

acs-admin/subsites

https://localhost:8443/acs-admin/apm/package-instances?package_key=xowiki

admin/site-map

4: Re: Some new features (response to 1)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 11/02/22 10:46 AM

Very nice! Congrats on this new work.

Brian

5: Re: Some new features (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/15/22 06:52 PM

Here is one more new feature for admins, which is NaviServer specific. NaviServer support since 4.99.20 http client requests logs, which are similar to the access logs, but contain information about outgoing HTTP requests. This kind of requests ware becoming more important, since websites depend more and more on external (e.g., cloud) services. When the performance of these services becomes worse, it will influence the performance of the local website.

The new feature of the NaviServer nsstats module [1] can now analyze the httpclient log file and provides a quick overview if such requests in terms of performance, frequency, amount of data and HTTP status codes.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/nsstats

6: Re: Some new features (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 11/29/22 12:20 PM

The newest version of the XOTcl Request Monitor supports now ordering by start-time and ordering by end-time of a request. Before, the ordering was always an ordering by end-time only, making it for long-running requests harder to understand what happened in which sequence.

Additionally, the full date is shortened to show relative dates, to spot the relevant lines quicker.

All the best
-g