We are happy to release Xsemble 4.5.0 today. It is available for download from the download page.

We recommend that users from earlier releases switch to this new release quickly due to its subtle enhancements in many places. Given below are the enhancements.

Python Support

As posted earlier, this is a mutually beneficial alliance, and hence is the major attraction of release 4.5. You can build Python based console applications and web applications with this support.

  • The Method and Type components can be reused across the console and web applications. Thus, your coding effort is saved when you want to support console and web applications with common functionality.
  • We have been shipping a demo application, Demo1, with all supported technologies. In continuation of that tradition, the Demo1 application has now added two variants: one for Python console application and one for Python web application.
  • Documentation is updated to cover how to run the new supported kinds of applications.

Opening Old Projects & Repositories

Some old Xsemble artefacts could not be opened with recent Xsemble releases. We have enabled a mechanism to get the best of such projects with new Xsemble. Here is how it works:

  • Run a shell script on the projects first. This converts them halfway.
  • Open the project in Xsemble 4.5 so that the remaining migration is done.

All old projects are not the same, depending on the Xsemble version that they were written for, and given that the formats have changed gradually. However, we found that this methodology works on many of the variants and brings them back to life.

Other Changes

Here is a compilation of other changes that have gone in release 4.5.

  • When Xsemble volunteered to make automatic connections of a node with existing data nodes based on name similarity, it did not consider whether the connection is going to different layer (for which you need a transient node) or same layer. This has been enhanced now, to consider the compatibility based on same or a different layer.
  • Menu node is drawn in a slightly different way. One may notice a subtle change in the way it looks now.
  • Generated component code template for Java now make use of Optional construct to avoid a Null Pointer Exception at the time of converting to a primitive type.
  • Java’s new ProcessBuilder mechanism is used for running deployment commands, in favor of previous Runtime.exec. (Runtime.exec has become deprecated now.)
  • Getting the next node of execution is now implemented uniformly across supported platforms.
  • Log message changes and corrections where appropriate.
  • Some minor bug fixes.

 

Edit on March 8, 2024: Xsemble version 4.5.1 is now up. It has the layer color come up as the label background in the connection dialog boxes in the Asm WB. The documentation look has been changed. Plus there are quite a few improvements in the content.