We are pleased to announce that SPBAS v1.9.1 is now available for download from the customer area. This release offers 8 new features, 17 improvements and 24 bug fixes! We recommend that existing customers upgrade as soon as possible in order to take advantage of the exciting new features that SPBAS v1.9.1 offers.
  

Local License Key Grace Periods

Let me start by explaining how the SPBAS licensing method works. We provide integration code that embeds into your application. This integration code will contact your remote SPBAS licensing server once for initial activation. Upon successful activation the licensing server will return a local license key. The local license key will then be stored in the file system or the database (your choice) and will act as a cache. Each subsequent license validation will try the cached key first and only go remote for a new key if there’s a problem. Most commonly problems are that the cached local key has expired or the customer has moved the installation. In any case, it’s very important that your licensing server be online to serve out a new local license key on demand.

Imagine that your licensing server has been down for 3 days due to a hardware issue. Most of your customers are running your application on a cached local key and are experiencing no problems. However, one customer in particular has a local license key cache that has just expired. Your licensing server is down so a new local license key cannot be obtained. Luckily, you’ve configured the integration code in your application to use our new grace period feature. You’ve specifically configured it to try again for the next 10 days. So once a day, for 10 days, the integration code embedded in your application will try to contact your licensing server for a new local key. If the integration code is unable to obtain a new local key within the 10 day grace period then on the 11th day the customer will be presented with a licensing error. If your licensing server comes back online within the 10 day grace period a new key is fetched automatically without any interruption of service for your customer.

As you can see with the example above, this is a very important feature that we’ve introduced here. We hope you’ll never need it, but isn’t it nice to know that it’s there for you in case you do?

Take a look at the Optional Parameters section of our integration guide to see just how easy it is to implement.
  

Enhanced Performance

As many of you may know, our storefront packages (order/, kb/ and customers/) work around a writable/REST API which makes integration possibilities endless. It comes with a cost of though, that cost is the added overhead of the HTTP connections from the storefront to the SPBAS API server. Most of the time this isn’t a noticeable overhead, but on rare occasion it can be.

Many times the storefront and the API server are located on the same physical server. In this situation there’s really no need to connect through the writable/REST API. So what we’ve done is enabled an additional configuration to cover this situation. It is now possible to configure SPBAS to bypass the writable/REST API in favor of working with the local API directly. Enabling this configuration will eliminate the HTTP calls to the API server which results in a nice performance gain.

By default, all new installations of SPBAS from this point forward will have this configuration enabled by default.

Just to note, if your storefront is on one physical server with the rest of SPBAS on another server you must use the writable/REST API. Also to note, all installations of SPBAS before v1.9.1 are setup to use the writable/REST API by default.

Click here for documentation on how to enable or disable this new feature.
  

Code Hooks and Modules

We’ve added two new code hooks with v1.9.1. The first code hook is triggered to run with each API request, before the request has been processed. The second code hook is triggered to run after a package is created. Code hooks help you extend SPBAS by creating 3rd party modules set to run as the code hook is triggered.

We’ve also introduced new 3rd party login share modules for WordPress and Simple Machines Forum. If activated, the modules will keep the SPBAS user data in sync with WordPress and/or Simple Machine Forums.
  

Other New Features

Other new features include improvements to our addon system making it possible to require addons for specific purchases and we’ve added V.A.T. consumption tax support for our international customers.
  

In Closing…

Over the past 8 weeks we’ve managed to turn out a really nice release with v1.9.1. If you are an existing customer we encourage you to upgrade. If you’ve tried SPBAS before, now would be a great time to try it again.

As always, thank you guys for your support and feedback. Let me know what you think in the comments.