The LiveCode development team has been working hard on LiveCode 9, our next big feature release centred around the crowdfunded Infinite Livecode.  Today we’re releasing a second developer preview of LiveCode 9, featuring a major low-level LiveCode Builder enhancement along some really helpful new tools for LiveCode application developers.
You can get LiveCode 9 DP 2 via automatic updates from within the IDE (‘Help → Check For Updates’), or download an installer.
Run JavaScript from HTML5 apps
One of the most-requested enhancements for LiveCode HTML5 apps has been to be able to integrate with the surrounding webpage via JavaScript.  That’s now possible, using the do command.  For example, you can fetch the URL of the current page with:
local tLocation
do "document.location" as JavaScript
put the result into tLocation
Checkout the documentation for the do script as languageName command for more information.  We’ll also be releasing a blog in the next few days showing how you can use this feature in more detail.
New and improved widgets and libraries
The LiveCode for FM project has delivered some new extensions for use in your LiveCode apps, including:
- a “spinner” (activity indicator) widget.  You can use it to provide visual feedback to users that something is going on, but you’re not sure how long it’s going to take to complete.  Spinners are often used in mobile apps instead of progress bars.
- an OAuth2 authentication flow library that helps you let users log into your app using Facebook, Google or GitHub
We’ve also added a new library for parsing command-line options to standalones, greatly improved the usability and responsiveness of the tree view widget when viewing extremely large arrays, and fixed several corner cases in the JSON library.
LiveCode Builder virtual machine improvements
LiveCode Builder source code is compiled to low-level bytecode, and the resulting bytecode is run by a “virtual machine” (VM)built into the engine.  As part of the Infinite LiveCode project, it’s been re-written from scratch.
The new VM provides a framework that enables better extensibility, better error reporting, and (in the future) optimisation of LCB code to make it run faster.
Because the new VM does more comprehensive run-time checking, there may be some widgets that stop working; many of them may be fixable just by recompiling the widget, but others might require very minor changes to the source code.
What’s next?
In the next developer preview of LiveCode 9, we expect to bring some major LiveCode Builder language improvements, including the ability for power users to hook widgets into Android Java APIs.
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