POG 2.0.1: A better code generator

A few hours ago, POG was upgraded to the latest release: 2.0.1. The main focus of this release was mostly bug fixes, but we couldn’t resist adding a pretty significant new feature as well. The ability to mass update all generated POG objects.

Nowadays, users expect their desktop applications to be capable of updating themselves without manual intervention. For example, many Google desktop apps, such as Google Talk, or the Google Toolbar, update themselves automatically when a new version is released.

In the same line of thought, we wanted to make POG updates more dynamic and seamless without compromising one of its advantages over PHP frameworks. Since POG generated objects are one- time generated, they differ from dynamic database abstraction libraries such as ActiveRecord.

However, this double-edged sword had a major con: Whenever a new version of POG comes out and you want to take advantage of the new functionality, you have to manually upgrade each object individually. And although this process was made easy by @link, it still meant that you had to “waste” 1 min for every object upgraded…No more!

We’ve finally introduced a mass update functionality which upgrades all the objects in the /objects directory in 1 click. By clicking on “POG Update” in the setup interface, Setup contacts the POG server and if there is a newer version available, regenerates newer versions of all your objects and present them to you in a zip file.

This functionality was made possible by the SOAP architecture adopted in 2.0.0 and we’re already starting to see how this enables POG to get the best of both worlds: Easy updates make POG closer to PHP frameworks in terms of flexibility but still allows POG to keep the speed advantage obtained by using Generated Objects as opposed to dynamic database abstraction.

One final advantage of the SOAP architecture being used by the code generator is that other web applications built on top of POG, such as Web Form Factory immediately take advantage of this new release without having to modify any code.

For a complete list of features, take a look at the POG Google group