The guys at ajaxian.com have reported about a current survey regarding the popularity of common AJAX frameworks. It is quite clear why prototype is the winner. It's well-known, small and easily embedable into existing pages. However I think it is interesting that Mochikit is less widely used, because the targets of these libraries are comparable in my opinion. And Mochikit does not depends on extensions of native objects (especially Object.prototype) which makes it the better choice.

I should mention that in my opinion the whole survey is quite problematic because of their comparison of different levels of so named "AJAX frameworks". For a next survey I would suggest to divide the list into these groups:

AJAX wrappers & DOM utilities:

• Prototype & Scriptaclous & Rico
• Moo.fx
• jQuery
• Yahoo UI
• Mochikit
• XAJAX
• DWR (includes backend code, too)

Framework & Toolkits:

• Dojo
• Atlas
• GWT
• qooxdoo (seems to be missing ;)) 

I've grouped together Scriptaclous and Rico because they both depend on Prototype which means they are more or less an extension of this library and not a real separate solution.

What do you think? 

After only two weeks since the ground-breaking release of qooxdoo 0.6 quite a lot of progress has been made. We have received many contributions and bugfixes from the community. These patches as well as our own  modifications have been integrated into the code base in the ongoing effort to raise qooxdoo's stability.

As has been previously announced, we try to release often, now that some of the most challenging reconstructions like namespaces have been mastered. While API changes for this minor release are negligible, migration scripts are available to upgrade existing applications, of course.

Preliminary browser support for Safari has been introduced. It would be great if Safari users could help in identifying, analyzing and fixing the various layout problems. It is still not recommended to use qooxdoo applications in Safari-based production environments.

Besides bugfixes and stability improvements there are some interesting additions as well. Tabs may optionally include close buttons, the tree widget TreeFullControl now supports multiple root nodes. Iframes containing external documents now have built-in blocking support to not interrupt user actions like drag & drop.

Application development is even faster than before: the easy-to-use make shell commands that generate optimized and tailor-made custom applications run much faster. Users get a jump-start for their application development by using the skeletons included in the qooxdoo SDK.

We would like to thank all people involved in qooxdoo development for their help and contribution. Every user's feedback is important to continuously improve qooxdoo as one of the most amazing JavaScript frameworks around. Enjoy!

• Release Notes
• Downloads of SDK or pre-build package

Really good news. My vocabulary may to be too limited to tell you how great the latest changes in IE7 RC1 are. Microsoft announced that they have "recently made some great fixes to our engine to improve the garbage collection routine and to reduce unbounded memory growth." and that one "should see noticeable improvements on AJAX sites in the Release Candidate we shipped last week". Yes indeed, we do see tremendeous improvements.

In fact many demos of qooxdoo run much faster now in IE7 compared to IE6. And they are even faster than in Firefox 1.5 in many cases. This is a huge jump in performance. Microsoft did not tell about their exact modifications, of course. Anyway, they have fixed the major problem of large JavaScript-based web applications. This problem, despite having a catchy name, was mentioned many times before like here, here and there: If you have many objects created, which are simply accessible in the current scope, all methods and features of JavaScript slow down dramatically. Yeah, right, the entire execution speed drops significantly. No other browser besides IE shows such a strange behavior. It is quite interesting that IE6 really gets slower the larger the total number of (accessible) objects. Sure, it is logical that more instanciated objects need more memory, but it is not logical that at the same time this will dramatically reduce the performance of any code (that is not even accessing this data).

With the release candidate RC1 of their new browser version IE7, it seems that they have finally fixed this issue. You can test it yourself in this test case, which has been available in qooxdoo for several months to analyze and measure the IE performance problems. Please look at status bar of your browser (maybe you need to enable the status bar in the IE7 security settings). It will display the execution time of each loop while a large number of objects exists. On my machine the IE6 needs ~1400ms, while IE7 needs ~30ms, which is roughly the time Firefox 1.5 needs. Definitely incredible! Bright future for modern web applications.

Here comes the most advanced qooxdoo version ever! qooxdoo 0.6 introduces namespaces as the most noticeable change. This step has been combined with a long thought-out and at the end well-structured directory layout.

Integrated is one of the most advanced build systems. This new system allows you to generate tailor-made user applications linked against the qooxdoo framework. You can even include your own project classes and optimize them along with qooxdoo. Using this new build system you can generate blazingly fast and highly optimized qooxdoo builds.

A new ground-breaking qooxdoo-based API viewer was added to make software development with qooxdoo easier than ever before. Supposed to become every qooxdoo users' number one resource, it shows all available packages, classes, properties and methods. All related information is connected by hyperlinks which gives you a highly convenient way to access the relevant information.

Of course there are also new widgets. A new advanced table widget has been introduced which is a virtual list view component that allows to handle many thousands of entries. Its features also make it possible to dynamically load the data from a remote server (using RPC for example). A splitpane - one of the long-awaited widgets - is now included. Full-blown logging capabilities featuring various appenders are available as well.

There are a lot more changes and enhancements. For details please take a look at the release notes. Migration support simplifies the switch from the last qooxdoo release 0.5.3. qooxdoo 0.6 is the perfect framework to build highly-interactive web applications. Why don't you start now? Just download qooxdoo today!

A interesting read at webkit.org: David Hyatt explains the problems with the execution order of stylesheets and scripts and the well known "Flash of Unstyled Content" (FOUC) problem. Thank you David for this insight.