qooxdoo 0.6.3 released

Posted on November 30, 2006 by Sebastian Werner

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.

Enjoy!

qooxdoo at the iX Conference in Frankfurt

Posted on November 30, 2006 by Jens Lautenbacher

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.

Andreas at our booth (shared with the RAP project)

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 (innoopract/Eclipse) at his talk about RAP

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.

New qooxdoo Tutorial

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Fabian Jakobs

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.

qooxdoo 0.6.2 released

Posted on November 22, 2006 by Andreas Ecker

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.

Enjoy!