Release of v3.13 of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

August 30, 2016
Conor O'Neill
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We have just completed the deployment of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform v3.13 to all our actively updated grids. This is mainly a bug-fix and enhancement release with no major new features.

Please pay particular attention to the extra notes below on Node.js 0.10.x, Cordova Light and CocoaPods 1.x.

Highlights

  • Fixed: Release builds of Forms Apps failing for Android in Build Farm
  • Fixed: Photos saved as drafts are not being displayed in Forms App
  • Fixed: Cordova push template does not compile for Android in Build Farm
  • Fixed: Data browser not available error in certain situations
  • Fixed: API Mapper does not POST JSON body correctly
  • Fixed: API Mapper converting header values to lowercase
  • Fixed: Forms App Title not applying when built and deployed to mobile device
  • Fixed: Building iOS App in Build Farm fails where credential bundle has no password
  • Fixed: FHC CLI keypass parameter does not work for FHC BUILD IOS debug
  • Fixed: FHC CLI builds are not in history
  • Fixed: FHC CLI help text incomplete for build command
  • Fixed: Login prompt on App Store incorrectly mentions email address
  • Fixed: Undeploy button in Resources screen doesn't work
  • Fixed: Git force push breaks all future application updates
  • Fixed: App Store apps binary history shows incorrect date for latest upload
  • Enhancement: Improved performance of FHC CLI export of Forms Submissions for large data sets
  • Enhancement: Added "--clean" option for FHC CLI clone of repos to match Studio behaviour
  • Enhancement: Analytics now shows Monthly Active Devices
  • Enhancement: Server SDKs published to npmjs under ASL-2.0 license
  • Enhancement: All templates updated to use the newly open sourced SDKs
  • Enhancement: Updated Node.js Unified Push Server sender library to latest
  • Enhancement: Connections screen performance improved for large number of connections
  • Enhancement: Git Branch/Tag no longer truncated at 15 chars in deploy history

FHC CLI

To get the fhc fixes above, you need to update to the latest version, which has been published to NPM. You can do this with:

npm install -g fh-fhc@2.13.0-430

Known Issues

  • Swift templates in Studio do not build. Workaround: In Podfile change 
    pod 'FeedHenry', '4.1.0'

    to

    pod 'FeedHenry', '4.1.1'
  • Unable to delete some Forms Themes. No workaround exists. Will be fixed in a later release.
  • Japanese localisation is incomplete

Node.js 0.10.x End of Life - Action Required

The Node.js Foundation Long-term Support Working Group has stated that Node 0.10.x ends LTS on October 1st 2016. This means no more maintenance updates or security fixes. The current LTS is Node 4.x which is available in all of our actively updated Grids and will be in LTS until April 2018.

We strongly recommend that all customers begin deploying their Cloud Apps and MBaaS Services using Node 4.x from now on. Our experience has been that most apps need minimal changes to work with Node 4.x. You may need to update the versions of various module dependencies in package.json if you see errors in deployment. Modules which have native code dependencies appear to be the most likely to need updating to latest versions.

Whilst is is not mandatory, you should update the version of fh-mbaas-api  to 5.13.1 or later in package.json. This gives you all of our latest server sdk bug-fixes and performance improvements.

Detailed Node.js API changes from 0.10 to 4.x are listed here.

Upcoming major change in v3.14 - Removal of Cordova Light

In our next release we are removing Cordova Light Templates from the platform. We created this App type several years ago to enable users to build Cordova Apps in our Build Farm using only the www folder from Cordova. This was to address several feature/usability gaps in Cordova at that time. However Cordova is now at a point in its maturity where our Light Apps are no longer required. Everywhere in the past that you might have used Cordova Light, you will just use Cordova. Note that existing Cordova Light Apps will continue to build in our Build Farm as before.

As part of this change, we will also be removing the outdated Config Tab from Cordova applications. You should use the standard Cordova config.xml to make any configuration changes. All of our templates will ship with a fully-commented functionally-equivalent config.xml to replace the current Config Tab.

Our Forms App Template will be moving to full Cordova too.

Migration documentation will be provided with the 3.14 release.

Upcoming breaking change in v3.14 - CocoaPods 1.x Support

We will be upgrading to the latest stable version of CocoaPods for Native iOS Apps in our Build Farm in v3.14. This is non-backwards-compatible with our current CocoaPods v0.39 and you will need to migrate your podfile to the latest DSL format. General instructions are available here and we will provide more detailed documentation closer to the release.

Last updated: October 31, 2023