v1.6.0 beta 1 - escaping fixes, nickname change support & websockets support

Due to the amount of changes we decided to create a beta first. Please help us test.

Escaping

Using nicknames and rooms with non-ASCII characters has not been possible until now due to some wrong implementations on our side. With this beta release, various fixes have landed to address these issues.

Nickname change support

• Candy is now finally able to rename a user which sends a nickname change to rooms you're in.
• New API method: Candy.Core.Action.Jabber.SetNickname(nickname) to change a user's nickname (e.g. by plugins).

Websocket support

• With the upgrade to Strophe version 1.1.1, it's now possible to connect to a websocket endpoint. This is currently undocumented but works by supplying a ws:// or wss:// URL as the first parameter of Candy.init().
• Servers that support websocket at this point: Prosody mod_websocket, Openfire websockets.

Build tool change

We replaced the existing build tool with Grunt. This should make contributing much easier (especially also for windows users). In order to contribute to Candy, please read CONTRIBUTING.md. If you're already familiar with grunt, these are the commands available:

• grunt watch watches the filesystem for changes, runs jshint on the changed files and if no errors are there, runs concat and uglify to build candy.bundle.js and candy.min.js.
• grunt jshint runs jshint with our defined rules
• grunt concat concats source files and library files to candy.bundle.js and libs.bundle.js
• grunt uglify minifies bundles to candy.min.js and libs.min.js
• grunt docs regenerates documentation

All grunt tasks should notify you (if supported by the OS you're on) if the task is finished.

Various features and fixes

Other fixes and new features include:

• Support jQuery >= 1.9 (we still have a IE version check though)
• Display error message if autojoin config param is empty
• Add ARIA label to text field (fixes #182, thanks @jrbl)
• Linkify subject by default (fixes #196)
• New Brazilian portuguese translation (fixes #143, thanks @renato)
• Fix privacy list error detection for Prosody (fixes #200)
• New event trigger before connecting which enables Plugins to reliably create stanza handlers
• Update example (fixes #203, thanks @lkraav)
• Remove deprecated event system

Thanks a lot to all the contributors, we appreciate this!

As usual, if you discover bugs, open an issue and if you have questions, ask in our mailinglist (no gmail address required to subscribe).