Beyond Java

Enhancements

• GitHub user Jepsar contributed input masks to <b:inputText />. That's a feature requested more than a year ago, so we're happy to deliver it at last.
• The datatable is still one of the most popular widgets. This time, Matthew Broadhead contributed an option to scroll the datatable horizontally on mobile devices. In theory, the datatable is a responsive widget by design, but this fails for very small displays. So it's good to be able to scroll it as a last resort.
• Guillermo González de Agüero contributed the option to disable BlockUI on a per-request basis:

  This feature is particularly useful for short-running requests. The idea of BlockUI is to give the user valuable feedback that the computer is busy. However, in the case of short AJAX requests, BlockUI only adds unecessary eye-strain to the user.

• TypeAhead required the backing list to be a List. This excluded hashtables. Benjamin Asbach contributed a pull request fixing that. Now the minimum requirement is Iterable. This includes every popular collection type with the exception of ordinary arrays.
• Matthew Broadhead contributed a pull request allowing you to add both Glyphicons and Font Awesome icons to the header of a panel.
• Jepsar contributed a pull request adding a decent JavaScript API to <b:poll />.
• He also added an option to filter <b:messages /> and <b:growl /> by severity. Now you can limit the messages shown by providing a comma-separated list of severities. This, in turn, allows you to display error messages different than simple info messages. For instance, you could "growl" error messages and use <b:messages /> for the other messages.

Bugfixes

There are also a couple of bugfixes. The most important of them is a security fault of <b:inputSecret />. Until BootsFaces 1.1.1, it simply hides the password to the user, but it sends the password to the browser. In other words: it might send the password to a hacker. So please update to BootsFaces 1.1.2 to fix this bug. Thanks to GitHub user Yavin who pointed out this bug!

Wrapping it up

BootsFaces 1.1.2 is clearly one of the minor evolution steps of the BootsFaces saga, but even so it's worth updating. What's new about this version is that it contains more pull requests than regular commits. This shows that BootsFaces is used by an active and helpful community. This, in turn, is a great motivation to work on the project.

After a long period of focusing on quality, the next version will probably concentrate on features again. For instance, it'll allow you to create tabs and datatable columns dynamically, pretty much the way <ui:repeat /> works. Stay tuned!