Today it's exactly one year since ATK 5.6 was released. So the new release was long overdue.

It's finally here, along with a new website which has a lot less fuzz, and is more to the point.

The changelog is a whopping 1056 lines. This translates to rougly 300 changes for this release. We might say this is a new generation, which is marked with a new major version number, and a new default layout. And it finally has ajax support (the way you are used to in ATK: add a flag to add autocompletion to a field, add one line of code to make things refresh on the fly). Most of you have been using the nightlies for months now, so this may not be new for you, but many companies are still using 5.6 for their apps.

The new release can be downloaded here.

Given the amount of changes, upgrading might not be trivial. Consult the forum if you need help.

The phpthrowdown competition has officially started. Our timeslot actually began 4 hours ago, but we started roughly 2 hours ago (just couldn't get myself to get up at 6 am on a saturday :)).

So far, we've been defining the application we're going to build, been designing a data model, importing our framework into the repository, and we're currently starting the actual coding.

We have a team of five:

• Almer Kaasschieter, our graphical guru who will design the gui

• Jasper van der Hulst, our productmanager, who will be coaching us, write docs and oversee the functionality
• Guido van Biemen, programmer
• Yury Golovnya, programmer
• me (Ivo Jansch), also as a programmer

We've decided to create a small application for the automotive industry (to keep track of car models etc.)

I'll try to post updates to our progress as comments to this blog entry.

I would like to thank Elizabeth, who did a great job organizing this, and Bill, who runs the SVN server and has been very helpful so far in getting us started with the repository.

One of the things that in a complex system can complicate testing, is the fact that you may rely on the database a lot. You can always mock the database, but this slows down writing the tests.

Ruby on Rails has a feature called 'fixtures', which makes setting up test databases pretty easy.

Inspired by this, a few of my fellow ATK developers have written a system to make using test databases very easy. Not only with fixtures, but also with automatic cloning of an actual database to be able to use actual data in tests (where this is relevant).

Peter has written a blogpost about this on our company website. If you're using ATK and want to increase your unit/webtesting productivity, check out his entry.

We've just released ATK 5.6.0, the next stable version of the Achievo ATK framework. The new release can be downloaded here.

This release contains over 140 changes and improvements.

Some highlights of the changes since ATK 5.5:

• 5 new attributes, from a simple attribute for manipulating URLS to a flexible calculator that can add columns containing arbitrary calculations of other attributes, and a generic attribute that can turn any other attribute into an internationalised data field.

• A new 'shuttle' relation for easy selection of records in many-to-many relationships.
• 2 new themes, 'macoslike' and 't3skin'. The latter creates a Typo3 4.0 look for ATK, useful for integrating ATK applications into a Typo3 environment.
• An AJAX based generic data structure search functionality.
• An atkMessageQueue for relaying messages to the user.
• Many API enhancements (new methods, new features and new flags)

And many more fixes and improvements. The complete change log can be found on the release notes page.