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All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America. 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 1 Netscape Communications Corporation, 501 East Middlefield Road, Mountain View, CA 94043 New Features in this Release This section contains the following topics: • Changes to Server-Side JavaScript • Changes to Core JavaScript 1.2 • Upgrading from an Earlier Release • Backward Compatibility with Earlier Releases Changes to Server-Side JavaScript With the release of the 3.x versions of Netscape web servers, Netscape LiveWire 1.01 is fully integrated into the web servers. Since LiveWire database connectivity is now integrated as the LiveWire Database Service portion of server-side JavaScript, developers do not have to install LiveWire as a separate product. Simply turn on the JavaScript support in the Administration Server to make the necessary components available. The following improvements have been made to server-side JavaScript: • Support for core JavaScript 1.2. See “Changes to Core JavaScript 1.2” on page 5. • New Lock class. The Lock class allows safe sharing of information with multiple incoming requests. See “Sharing Objects Safely with Locking” on page 279. • New SendMail class. The SendMail class lets you generate email from JavaScript. See “Mail Service” on page 287. • Property value types. Property values can be of any data type, rather than just strings, for the project, server, and request objects. In particular, you can now use project and server objects to store references to other objects. See “The project Object” on page 260, “The server Object” on page 261, and “The request Object” on page 249. 3 Changes to Server-Side JavaScript • Direct access to HTTP request and response headers. See “Request and Response Manipulation” on page 302. • Access Java classes. You can access Java classes using LiveConnect. See Chapter 21, “LiveConnect Overview.” • IIOP. You can access legacy applications using IIOP. See Chapter 22, “Accessing CORBA Services.” • Multiple simultaneous connections. LiveWire has support for multiple simultaneous connections to multiple databases. See Chapter 15, “Connecting to a Database.” • Span multiple client requests. LiveWire database connections and transactions (and the objects used with them) can span multiple client requests instead of having to be restarted for each request. See “Individual Database Connections” on page 323 and “Managing Transactions” on page 348. • Stored procedures. LiveWire has support for stored procedures. See “Calling Stored Procedures” on page 354. • ODBC support. LiveWire has ODBC support under Unix. See “Supported Database Clients and ODBC Drivers” on page 372. • Multithreading. LiveWire supports multithreading of Informix, Oracle, and Sybase database client libraries for improved performance and scalability. See “Supported Database Clients and ODBC Drivers” on page 372. This support is available only if the underlying platform supports multithreading. For information on which platforms support it, see Enterprise Server 3.x Release Notes 4 Server-Side JavaScript Guide Changes to Core JavaScript 1.2 Changes to Core JavaScript 1.2 JavaScript version 1.2 provides the following new features and enhancements: • Create objects with initializers. You can create objects using object initializers. See “Object Literals” on page 83 and “Creating New Objects” on page 141. • Changes to arrays. Array objects can be created using literal notation. See “Creating an Array” on page 148. • Regular expressions. Regular expressions are patterns used to match character combinations in strings. You create a regular expression as an object that has methods used to execute a match against a string. You can also pass the regular expression as an argument to the String methods match, replace, search, and split. The RegExp object has properties most of which are set when a match is successful, such as lastMatch which specifies the last successful match. The Array object has new properties that provide information about a successful match such as input which specifies the original input string against which the match was executed. See Chapter 6, “Regular Expressions” for information. • New top-level functions Number and String. The Number function converts an object to a number. The String function converts an object to a string. See “Number and String Functions” on page 137. • Changes to eval. eval is no longer a method of individual objects; it is available only as a top-level function. See “eval Function” on page 135. • New and changed operators. • The new delete operator deletes an object, an object’s property, or an element at a specified index in an array. See “delete” on page 98. •If the <SCRIPT> tag uses LANGUAGE=JavaScript1.2, the equality operators == and != do not attempt to convert operands from one type to another, and always compare identity of like-typed operands. See “Comparison Operators” on page 90. 5 Upgrading from an Earlier Release • New and changed statements. • The break and continue statements can now be used with the new labeled statement. See “break Statement” on page 126 and “continue Statement” on page 127. • do...while repeats a loop until the test condition evaluates to false. See “do...while Statement” on page 124. • label allows the program to break outside nested loops or to continue a loop outside the current loop. See “label Statement” on page 125. • switch allows the program to test several conditions easily. See “switch Statement” on page 121. See the Server-Side JavaScript Reference for information on additional features. Upgrading from an Earlier Release If you have previously installed a 2.0 version of a Netscape web server, you should migrate the server settings when you install a 3.x version of a Netscape web server. For information on how to install the server and migrate settings, see the administrator’s guide for your web server. If you do not migrate old server settings when you install the server, you can migrate them later, using the “Migrate from previous version” link on the Netscape Server Administration Page. Information on this link is also in the administrator’s guide for your web server. If you have previously created JavaScript applications using LiveWire 1.x, you should be aware of the following changes that occur when you upgrade to 3.x and migrate old server settings: • Settings preserved. If the 2.x server had LiveWire turned on, the 3.x server will have server-side JavaScript turned on. Whether or not the Application Manager requires a password is also preserved. For more information, see “Configuration Information” on page 49. 6 Server-Side JavaScript Guide Upgrading from an Earlier Release • Config file upgraded and renamed. The existing livewire.conf file is upgraded and renamed jsa.conf. The new jsa.conf file points to the new Application Manager and the new sample applications. It also contains entries for all other applications you had in the old livewire.conf file. For details of the jsa.conf file, see “Application Manager Details” on page 71. • Applications are not moved. Upgrading server settings