Titanium Preview Release (PR3)

Titanium PR3 is now available!

PR3 is now available for download. If you had a previous version installed, please uninstall it before installing PR3. This will not be necessary in the future.

There’s a lot of big improvements in PR3 so I’ll get right to the awesomeness. If you’d prefer, you can also watch this screencast.

Improved Python and Ruby integration

We’ve made a lot of improvements in the Python and Ruby integration as it relates to interacting with each other, Javascript and the DOM. You can now more seamlessly integrate scripts written in these languages into your application.

Here’s a really cool example of seamless Python integration:

<script type="text/python">
    def dom_from_python(s):
        document.write(s)
</script>
 
<script>
dom_from_python("hello world")
</script>

You can now access the window and document objects in Python and Ruby just like you would in Javascript. In addition, any global object in Javascript is automatically available in Python and Ruby and vice versa.

Code Snippets Sandbox

Ever want to just test out a block of code or just try out some APIs? With the new code snippet feature in Titanium Developer you can do just that in the Sandbox.

Multi-platform Publishing

This feature is long overdue from PR1 but we wanted to cloud-enable this feature as part of the refactor such that you can more quickly and easily build cross-platform packages and so that we could easily add new package types for you. In PR3, when you now package your application, we’ll magically create cross platform distributions for you, push them into our cloud and provide you with a simple mechanism to give your users the ability to download them. You can make them private or public. If you make them private, only you’ll know the location of the distribution (this is the default). If you make them public, we’ll help you get further distribution through the new Application Exchange. We’ll also give you a nice and nifty little page to point your users to for getting your application:

Your applications are made available via edge servers worldwide so your users can get to your download as quickly as possible. We’ll even create a simple download page for you:

Application Sharing

What good’s an application if you can’t share it with others? In PR3, you can now view other applications built on Titanium in the Application Exchange. You can even rate them to provide feedback to the publisher!

Application Download Metrics

Ever wonder how many people have downloaded your application? Or worse, ever had the dreaded error from Sourceforge about not being able to “connect to the reporting system”? With the new application reporting feature, we’ll give you the last 7 days worth of download statistics for each of your applications.

And a lot more!

For a complete list of changes, please see the final changes in JIRA.

What’s next?

Our next major milestone now is Beta and we hope to make the Beta available near the beginning of May. Our goal is to be at production-quality GA around mid-June. We have a lot of work to make that happen.

The big focus from now until Beta is going to be around quality and stability:

• Documentation and samples. We’re working on a new site with full documentation and developer friendly content. We admit, the documentation sucks ass right now and our goal is to make a 1000% improvement before beta.
• Improved continuous and release builds across all major primary and secondary target platforms. We’re redoing our build infrastructure and virtualizing almost 2 dozen different operating system and machine architecture combinations.
• Massive improvements in test coverage – both unit and functional. we’re building out a new automated test suite to achieve high digit coverage of all our APIs.
• Automatic Crash Detection and Reporting. We’re integrated a new automatic crash and detection reporting system (both for the runtime and your applications) to help us gather issues and also gauge the stability of the platform.
• Improved and streamlined installation. We’re constantly improving how we can better and more quickly install the platform and applications.
• Better integration into Linux distributions. We’re working to make it more natural to install and use Titanium in a Linux distribution consistent way.
• Solidification of the final API. We’re not expecting big changes in the API between PR3 and the final GA but we do intend to review and make sure we have consistency in the final API.

As always, we want your feedback. If you have found issues, please report them in our Issue Tracking System. If you’d like to chat about upcoming features or problems, please join us on #titanium_app on irc.freenode.net or please join us at Community Site.

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