Release per October 14, 2021: InPlace v0.12.0

InPlace Version v0.12.0 delivers the following milestones in the project Practical Tools to Build the Context Web as supported by NLnet:

• Generate Screens (Milestone T8).

This release is being done while working on another milestone, the Context Name System (Mileston T9). However, that work includes creating a lot of models and it will speed up significantly when screens are generated automatically. In the course of this work, many improvements, fixes and extensions have been made. We'll report on them in the next release, except for a few very visible changes pertaining to the user interface in general..

Major changes

• Generate Screens. The Perspectives Distributed Runtime (PDR) is a local server. InPlace is a client that runs in a web browser. InPlace is a framework program: one adds applications to it, where an application consists of a model and screens. The screens are written in HTML and CSS, based on the React framework. Up till now, these screens must be written by hand. However, by making use of the perspectives modelled for a user role in some context, we can generate a custom screen for that user, re-using a set of standard components over and over again.

  Our experience with the visual modelling tool for Perspectives in Enterprise Architect shows the value of rapid iterations of model versions. However, for a lay person to validate a model, a practical user interface is indispensable. An end user experiences a system as a series of screens with functionality; not as a declarative model. If such screens have to be written by hand the iteration speed is greatly reduced.

  From now on, models can be explored immediately because whenever no screen is modelled by hand, one is generated for the user exploring the context. This is not only an advantage for the lay person, but for the modeller as well.

Minor changes

• InPlace app refactored. The code for the framework has been completely overhauled to improve code quality and to create a more general framework to run models in. In the previous version, model navigation was built into InPlace; this has been replaced by a new screen for model:System.
• User role choice. The top bar sports several new tools, one of which enables the end user to switch roles for a context (if he plays multiple roles in it).
• Notifications. It is now possible to describe a notification in a state transition. This works out as notifications in the operating system's notification mechanism, and as a list of notifications for each context. The end user can turn notifications on and off and can hide and show notifications for the currently displayed context.