I’m really excited to let everyone know that dsHistory has undergone some very major changes since you last heard about it!
After considering my options, I decided to make a hope for dsHistory at Google Code. Go and check it out. Through Google Code, dsHistory now has a proper issue tracker, an actual downloads area, a Subversion repository, a Subversion repository browser, and a wiki.
Speaking of the wiki, dsHistory now has a comprehensive usage doc, an examples doc, and an API doc. The demo has undergone quite a few changes and has been relocated. More docs will be added as needed. If you need support beyond the wiki, dsHistory now has a discussion group hosted on Google Groups. You can continue to get updates for major releases of dsHistory on this blog, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed to get updates every time a new build becomes available.
The dsHistory library itself has been revamped quite a bit. I don’t have a proper changelog set up yet, but I can tell you that the new version, posted as a feature download on the front page of its new home, is much more suitable for production than the last version that was released (v.9) . v1-pre, revision 32, features a reorganized library based on a more suitable design pattern, improved performance due to the implementation of lazy function definitions and other considerations, a fix for potential memory leaks in IE, and many bugfixes pertaining mostly to the way the window hash (i.e., bookmark support) is serialized, deserialized, updated, and the like. I’m sure issues will arise with v1-pre-r32, but that’s what the issue tracker is for now.
Upgrading dsHistory from v.9 to v1-pre-r32 should be easy. For the most part, you should be able to just drop the single dshistory.js or dshistory.compressed.js file in over top of the old library file. As of the date of this post, the external HTML page that was previously packaged with dsHistory is no longer needed (although it may be included later). If something isn’t working right after the upgrade, read the usage doc. If it’s still not working right, take a look at the examples or the demo. Still not working? Post in the discussion group.
My goal is to release what I would consider a stable version, v1, of dsHistory by February or March. The updated version of dsHistory on Google Code is in production in a number of different places (most notably our property mapping solution), but I’d like for dsHistory to have as many people try it out as possible before the final release is out.
Give me feedback! Comments, questions, even snide remarks are very much welcomed at this point. Also, if you use dsHistory in your app, please drop me a comment or post your experiences in the discussion group.
