Filed under: Announcements, Release
By Sebastian Werner @ November 30, 2006 7:05 pm
Just a week after the last release we are really happy to announce the next one today.
Some cleanups to the API were made: Class names (including their namespace prefix) were made more user-friendly by removing redundant parts, e.g. qx.dom.DomLocation was renamed to qx.dom.Location. Obsolete constants were removed. Several classes were modified to benefit from the new string optimizing feature that does not require artificial string constants anymore.
A much improved key event handling was introduced. The new handling provides a common subset for key events across all supported browsers. This is the most comprehensive key event abstraction layer in JavaScript frameworks we know of. Existing application code may need manual modification to continue to work as expected and to take advantage of the more robust features of the new key event handler.
Automatic migration support is available that should significantly reduce the time and effort to upgrade existing user applications to the new qooxdoo release.
For more detailed information about qooxdoo 0.6.3 please consult the corresponding release notes.
qooxdoo has been at the iX conference on "Better Software!" in Frankfurt, Germany on November, 28 and 29, 2006. We shared the booth with the innopract folks to feature our cooperation in the RAP project.
You can see Andreas preparing our qooxdoo demonstration page.
Not that many attendants as we wished (at the whole conference, not only our booth). Andreas gave a short talk on qooxdoo (sorry, no pics) and we had some interesting conversations also with other exhibitors.
Jochen Krause, CEO of innoopract and member of the Board of directors of Eclipse gave a talk on RAP where he prominently mentioned qooxdoo and our planned cooperation.
Filed under: Development, Survey
By Fabian Jakobs @ November 29, 2006 4:01 pm
Today we have added a new qooxdoo tutorial to our Wiki. It gives a step by step introduction of how to download and set up qooxdoo and how to build a first qooxdoo "Hello World" application in just 10 minutes.
This tutorial shows how to set up a new qooxdoo project using qooxdoo best practices. This project can serve as the basis for more complex qooxdoo applications.
The tutorial is targeted mainly at qooxdoo newbies who want to get an idea of what qooxdoo is but also advanced qooxdoo users might be interested to see how we suggest building new qooxdoo applications.
Filed under: Announcements, Release
By Andreas Ecker @ November 22, 2006 4:13 pm
Good news, everyone!
Despite of the minor change in version number, this release is again a major step in strengthening qooxdoo's position of being one of the most comprehensive and innovative AJAX frameworks. It now even includes support for WebKit and future versions of Safari!
It came as quite a surprise how many fixes, changes and additions we were actually able to include in this fine little package. During the eight weeks after release 0.6.1, many people have made contributions. Thanks to all qooxdoo users, contributors, patch monsters and supporters for helping to make the framework more mature and feature-complete!
Targeted as a maintenance release it includes many bugfixes and only minor changes in functionality or API. We recommend to upgrade any applications based on qooxdoo 0.6.1. Of course, there is migration support available, even if it is hardly needed this time.
As mentioned above and already announced in our developer blog, qooxdoo now includes support for WebKit. We expect to fully support the next major version Safari 3.0 which will be based on the current development of WebKit. There is only limited support for Safari in its current version 2.0.4, though. Reason is, that Safari 2.0 still has many bugs that can hardly be worked around. Luckily, many of those bugs are already fixed in the nightly builds of WebKit. Besides the various bugs, Safari 2.0's JavaScript engine and its execution speed is not competitive with respect to the latest versions of the other major browsers (Firefox 2.0, IE7, Opera 9). Good news is, that the current builds of WebKit are tremendeously faster than Safari 2.0, approximately by a factor of 7-8 for a typical qooxdoo demo.
We think it is worth to either use WebKit for now or wait for Safari 3.0 due in early 2007. There is probably not much sense in devoting more time and effort for Safari 2.0 specific problems. There are still some known issues concerning WebKit support (particularly for widgets that use scrollbars). It would be great if Mac users could give qooxdoo 0.6.2 a try and report any problem in bugzilla. Please use the most recent nightly build of WebKit and include its version information in any bug report.
For more detailed information about qooxdoo 0.6.2 please consult the corresponding release notes.
Safari support for qooxdoo is coming along nicely. qooxdoo support for the nightly build of WebKit is near to complete. Most demos and examples are working, including the API viewer . The screenshot shows the “At a Glance” example running in WebKit. Safari 2.0.4 shipped with the current OS X 10.4 is usable but still has some rendering issues.
For the next qooxdoo release we plan to fully support WebKit, which hopefully builds the basis for the next major release of Safari shipped with the upcoming OS X 10.5. We decided to target WebKit because of its improved standard support and its dramatically faster JavaScript engine. Some qooxdoo examples are up to seven times faster using WebKit compared to Safari 2. Even if we would fully support Safari 2, it will never be a good platform for big JavaScript applications.
Recently we have been puzzled by some statements of Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript programming language.
In Brendan's blog he wrote "For Mozilla 2, we will have a JIT-oriented JavaScript VM (details soon) that supports the forthcoming ECMAScript Edition 4 ("JS2") language" (October 13, 2006). Well, could hardly wait for any details. Another statement that made us curious was at The Ajax Experience this fall. In his slides about JavaScript 2.0 he mentioned "Open source optimizing VMs coming soon. Look for an announcement in a few weeks" (October 25, 2006). Interestingly, this mysterious announcement was in a section he called "JavaScript Fun Facts".
Well done Brendan, you are our Master of Suspense! Finally, as a revelation today came the announcement that is going to boost JavaScript. Congratulations to Adobe for their decision of contributing the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) as open source to the Mozilla project. And a warm open-source welcome to all the developers of the AVM! The code has just been committed into the Mozilla repository.
This is great news for qooxdoo being a client-side JavaScript framework. Performance has always been one of our major concerns, and we think we have pushed the limit for JavaScript based web applications, e.g. for qooxdoo's powerful browser-independent layout engine. Can't wait to tweak the last bit of performance out of any new Mozilla browser backed by the new JavaScript VM. This is going to change the future of browser-based applications. Cheers!
In my opinion there was never a reason why JavaScript should be slower than other typical script languages e.g. Python, Perl, Ruby, ... With the newest committment from Abobe to Mozilla we could reach a new level of performance in web applications.
As news.com reports "Adobe will provide the same software, called the ActionScript Virtual Machine, which it uses to run script code in the Adobe Flash Player 9. This virtual machine is expected to be built into future versions of the Firefox browser by the first half of 2008, said Frank Hecker, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation."
