It was in the pipe since a few weeks and it is now official: PURE v2 is out !

Download the library and get started!

Or simply take a look at the demos

New features

• A total code review in functional JS (Thanks Rog Peppe for the jump)
• ~8k when packed (35% less)
• No more inside eval / new Function(). Less possible side effects and improved compile response time
• More verbose error checks for easier debugging of templates and directives
• Added support for dojo and Sly plus a standalone mode (dojo, domAssistant, jQuery, Mootools, Prototype, Sizzle and Sly are supported now)
• All nested loops levels available within a function directive
• Nested directives makes the code more natural and easier to maintain

There is a guide to help you migrate your templates to v2 if you are still using v1.

New documentation and website

We entirely reviewed the documentation and migrated it to our website.

And to make it even better, the design has received an extreme makeover.

Feedback

As always, feedback is more than welcome on the PURE discussion group.

We took a multi-lingual approach for our web app from the very first day we started developing and even if our beta is not public yet, our private beta testers can already play in four languages: English, French, Dutch and Spanish.

In a few weeks, we will have a unique opportunity to meet the Spanish web scene.

On the 13th, 14th and 15th of November, the biggest Spanish web event, Evento Blog, will occur in Sevilla.

Thanks to the continuous effort of Ramón Suárez, a Spanish expatriate well known in the little web arena of Brussels, a Belgian web mission will take place.

This will give the chance to a few Belgian start-ups to discover the Spanish market a little bit deeper and meet its main actors (medias, VCs, ...).

Robin Wauters, writer for the famous blog Techcrunch, is joining the mission and will also be a keynote speaker.

If you are a Belgian start-up interested in the Spanish market, I can only invite you to join this wonderful opportunity. All the information is available here and there are still a few seats left: http://wiki.webmission.be/ebe09

For the others, I hope to see you there!

And thanks again Ramón.

As a background task for our web application BeeBole, I was looking for an easy and efficient way to produce PDF documents without being stuck with postscript like syntax or being feature limited in a design point of view.

Last week I discovered the tool I was looking for : WKHTMLTOPDF

By leveraging the power of the webkit engine through QtWebKit module, this thing is converting HTML with full CSS support to PDF the same way you “Save as PDF” from your browser

In this article, I'll show you the very first prototype I did of a possible WKHTMLTOPDF integration with our application.
Continue reading »

We started developing PURE, our JavaScript templates engine, a little more than a year ago.

And now, a Version 2 is out for trial...

Well, enough reasons to decide to give a new and fresh look to the current website and also redesign the logo which, until now, looked like this:

But this time, we decided to ask for your help in the choice of our future logo.

Thanks in advance !

The new version of PURE, our OpenSource JavaScript template engine, is out for trial.

Please have a look at those new examples and download the version 2 for tests.

If you followed the story, you may know this new version is more about a change in the inner logic than a set of new features.

However we think this new architecture will enable us to go further with the library.

The main changes are described here: Version 2 Release Notes. You will also find in the article a mini-guide to upgrade your templates still using PURE version 1.

In the coming weeks, the wiki will be updated with a refreshed documentation.

Any suggestion, ideas about how to structure it in a better way is highly welcome.

Heads & hands to write some parts too

Please have a look at the material above and send your feedback.

37Signals is a great company with amazing achievements. Behind Basecamp (an incredibly simple project management tool) and Ruby on Rails (Yeah, just that), they are now announcing they just dived into the Erlang world.

They use it for their Campfire application which is a web-based messaging/chatroom solution and the performances prove one more time that Erlang is a killer language when it comes to build stable and scalable back end systems.

You can read their full article here.

37Signals, Facebook,...

What are you waiting for? Start developing your own web application with Erlang now!

Mike Butcher just posted on TechCrunch Europe: GeeknRolla - The Movie

And Guess what? BeeBole is in!

Geek ‘n Rolla was a day long (April 21, 2009) conference for startups created by TechCrunch Europe. As part of the day we asked startups around Europe to celebrate with a little rocking out. This video was created by Bonney and Klein, conceived by Stradbroke Advisors. GeeknRolla was sponsored by Viadeo, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, School for Startups and Bootlaw.

GeeknRolla - The Movie from Mike Butcher on Vimeo.

On Behalve of BeeBole, I have to thank Bonney and Klein and Inma Martinez from Stradbroke Advisors for inviting us to participate to the video and of course TechCrunch Europe.

It feels good to be considered as a rocking start-up.

Ben Kepes from CloudAve recently wrote Is There a sweet spot for features? about usability issues in web applications offering more and more features everyday.

As he states:

It’s easy as pie to create a good looking and intuitive user experience when your solution only includes a few functional areas, but as you roll out further functionality all of a sudden that simplicity and intuitive feel starts to lose out to nested menus, complexity and options.

In my opinion, you have to solve two main issues:

1. How do you combine keeping it simple for users with simple needs with offering a complete solution to power users.
2. How do you display and browse your data, especially when the amount of features becomes huge.

Before going further, I encourage you to watch our first video about the BeeBole interface and features illustrating a few of the points discussed here.

Continue reading »

During the week-end, our blog has been through an extreme makeover.

1. The design has changed. If you can't see those changes or if the design looks weird, just hit the refresh button of your web browser.
2. The re-design includes a lot of new features, mainly in the side bar: direct access to the recent posts, pictures, videos, ... and at the end of each post you will find a list of all the related posts.
3. The URL has also changed. Instead of http://beebole.com/blog/, it is now http://beebole.com/en/blog/. The old URL being redirected to here, it shouldn't be an issue for the old links you might have in your favorites.

Don't hesitate to give us any feedback about the new design/features or to report bugs via the comments hereunder.

Our BeeBole account on Twitter is back from the limbo. So you can start now following our daily activities:

http://twitter.com/beebole

For some reasons, the account was deleted 6 months ago and the "undelete" feature of Twitter was not working for the last 3 months.