Some technical changes in the upcoming 2.8

I would like to share some notes on technical changes in the upcoming release of JomSocial. These changes won't be immediately apparent at first, but a lot of work were put into it. We believe that it is necessary, greatly enhance our code base and making our growth forward easier.

PHP class autoloading

We've decided to deprecate the current CFactory::load(…) function and use php class autoloader instead. Since almost all web hosting already support spl_autoload function, manual class loading is no longer necessary.

By removing manual class loading, from our testing we found that memory usage drop by as much as 6%, which is substantial. 3rd party developer only have to include our /libraries/core.php file to setup the autoloader

Strong "fluent" design

"Fluent" design allow method calls to be chained. This creates a shorter syntax and often makes the code a little more readable. We apply fluent design aggressively within the models and libraries code.

Simpler stream query

Our social stream, has historically been the bottleneck in term of performance. Our work with Offiria project in particular taught us that massive performance gain, even in a highly interactive stream is possible.

In 2.8, we simplify the way stream data is created and fetched. It no longer tries to aggregate content during display. This is actually done during stream creation. We have also moved the stream content creation from stream creation time, to actual display time. Conventional wisdom would tell you that generating the content once and simply reading it off for display would give the best performance, but this is often not the case. By generating the content to be displayed at runtime, we tackled multiple issues at once, including multi-language support and stale content issues.

Embracing Joomla! Framework

In previous releases, we wasted a lot of time simply trying to cater to the lowest common denominator between Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 2.5. By removing our dependency on Joomla! 1.5, we were able to move some deprecated Joomla! functions and focus on making them compatible with Joomla! 2.5/3.0. A lot of work remains, but we're getting ever so closer to full Joomla! 3.0 compatibility.

So, when can you download 2.8 ?

I understand why people are so eager to get their hands on this latest build. Our original target date of early October has came and gone. Unfortunately, it is taking longer than we expected. I won't give any exact date, but I want to assure you that we work extremely hard to get it ready. We believe that it is irresponsible for us to release it unfinished. Until then, we will try to keep everyone updated.