Easyling release notes April, 2024

May 8, 2024 - Easyling.com

As April winds down, it’s time for our regularly scheduled notes about the updates we released that are sure to “May"ke your day! The main new feature is Bootstrap. This can accelerate the serving of Crest-enabled sites. Read the full article for the details!

Bootstrap

Basic publishing, with the JavaScript-based translation engine, works by downloading the translation to the visitors’ web browsers and applying them once the source-language content had loaded. However, in large projects, with millions of words, the dictionary file can be as large as multiple megabytes. On slower Internet connections, this can cause a noticeable delay. The bootstrap feature addresses it.

The term “bootstrap” comes from the phrase “to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps”. This phrase was initially meant to illustrate an absurdly impossible action, as in actually lifting oneself off the ground by pulling on the boots one is wearing. Over time, the phrase came to describe any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. This latter meaning is why this feature is called such.

Bootstrapping allows the creation of a smaller JavaScript-type export so that the initial loading can be faster. It works by creating a Work package filtered to contain the most common segments. You can then use it to create the export. This feature can be accessed near the bottom of the JavaScript publishing section of the Dashboard.

Screenshot of the Bootstrap feature

It provides two key options:

  1. Create Bootstrap work package: First, you must enter a value for the approximate number of segments you wish to include. 2000 is a good starting point, but you can tweak this. Each project will have a different ideal value. With this option, a new Work package is created that contains the most common segments.
  2. Cleanup: Use this option after deleting many pages from the Pages list. In this scenario, the segments are not deleted by default and this may throw off the Bootstrap calculation. With the Cleanup option, these segments can be deleted ensuring that the Bootstrap calculation can work as expected.

Once the Work package is generated, you can go to the Work package list, find the package and create an export in the action menu.

Loading the smaller number of segments at the start ensures that the initial loading is faster. Additional content is then downloaded on-demand.

Miscellaneous

Naturally, we also added a few smaller tweaks:

  • We upgraded the XTM integration libraries due to recent changes.
  • A fix was implemented with URL mapping.
  • We fixed an error where the JSON path tester would fail when a script with a syntax error was entered.
  • Include rules, as defined in the Pages list, are now better handled in the JavaScript-based translator.