As always, once you have a new version of a product out, the requests come flooding in. To that end, hot on the heels of our recent 2.4.1 release, we're now releasing WebSync version 2.4.2, fully backwards compatible and ridiculously over-tested!

WebSync Server

For WebSync Server, this release fixes one issue, and introduces some nice new features. Here are the details.

Bugfixes

• We've applied a fix to address issues with encoding of extended characters sets. UTF-8 encoding is now used across the board.

Features

• The javascript client is now more resilient to bad data; as a result, the javascript client will now display a nice message if you attempt to send invalid data through WebSync, letting you know exactly what caused the problem.
• The "Unsubscribe" event will be fired for users that are getting disconnected due to idling, which means all clients are guaranteed to unsubscribe to any channel to which they've subscribed.
• The database name is no longer required to be "WebSync"
• Support for external config files was added
• Connection string names and HTTP Direct Publish settings can now be specified in the config file, allowing you to override attributes you've set in code

WebSync On-Demand

For WebSync On-Demand users, you will also get the benefits of the additional error checking and extended character sets, and will also get a great new feature - meta data! In the past, the one difficulty with using WebSync On-Demand was knowing when users subscribed to or unsubscribed from a given channel. With version 2.4.2, this problem is a thing of the past, as we've added support for meta-information. To take advantage of this feature, you simply add an additional property when subscribing to a channel, "onMetaReceive". This function will receive notifications when new users subscribe or unsubscribe from the specified channel, and you can make your application update accordingly. You can learn more about this new property by reading the subscribe documentation. And for those of you wondering what happens when someone kills their browser without properly unsubscribing first - when WebSync performs its automatic cleanup, you'll be notified that the user has unsubscribed, so you're covered there too!

Don't forget to update your client javascript url to:

http://sync.frozenmountain.com/client.js?v=2.4.2

Those of you using the .Net API, please get a new copy of the WebSync.Core.dll from our downloads section.

With the latest release of WebSync On-Demand comes a new client versioning system. We want you to always have access to the latest copy with the most recent enhancements and fixes, but still allow you to choose when and how you release it into your application.

A typical client script would look something like:

<script src="http://sync.frozenmountain.com/client.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

This will always return the most recent copy of the JavaScript client with the latest fixes.

To target a specific version of the client, simply update the query string to include the version number.

<script src="http://sync.frozenmountain.com/client.js?v=2.4.1" type="text/javascript"></script>

The "v" parameter stands for "version" and can be used to download a specific client version. For production applications, you may want to include the version as a matter of habit. We do our very best to ensure that 100% backwards compatibility is maintained, but integration in browsers can sometimes do interesting things, especially when multiple frameworks/scripts are merged together into the same page. When a newer version arrives, you can then run your application in a test environment with the latest copy to iron out any potential conflicts before pushing it out to your clients.

We're proud to announce that the latest version of WebSync is live in our new premium data center! Along with it comes new JavaScript, .NET, and PHP clients/downloads as well as our brand-new online system for purchasing and managing concurrent On-Demand users across domains.

Every On-Demand account has received at least 10 free concurrent users. If you already had an active domain registered with us, your users have been automatically assigned to your domains for your convenience. Purchasing more users is simple and easy. Just visit www.frozenmountain.com/websync/purchase and enter the number of users you wish to purchase.

Important: to move your environment to the new premium On-Demand center, update your targets to point to sync.frozenmountain.com instead of websync.frozenmountain.com (i.e. http://sync.frozenmountain.com/client.js). No other action should be necessary on your part.

We have incorporated a number of fixes into this release that improve client-side browser support and server-side stability and performance. For the client alone, we ran over 1500 individual unit tests in various browsers to ensure support in as many scenarios as we could envision. We are also now adhering to a stable versioning system (to be discussed in a later post) that should give you the stability of individual releases and us the flexibility to make them available to you on your time.

Please, as always, let us know what you think! Our service is nothing without someone to serve, and we take all comments and feedback with utmost consideration. Thanks for all the great feedback to date - we look forward to making it even better for the next release!