It seems that Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows Vista, introduced at least one interesting, not to say mysterious, phenomenon. It only arises when the user is trying to open a local HTML file with so-called "active content".
After some investigation we found out that it is problematic to open local HTML pages which reference non-existing JavaScript files. During development of qooxdoo applications this could be caused by renaming or moving a class without a re-execute of "make" to re-index the available classes (to regenerate the includer script).
Annoyingly, the displayed error is not very helpful. It just says "Invalid character" in line "0". No hint about security at all. All files are stored on the local file system. No "src" attribute uses another protocol like "http://"or an address of an (external) server. Just simple, relative paths. There seems to be no reason to interpret them the way IE7 under Vista does. The files do not access remote resources. They are not stored in other security zones. We really do not know what Internet Explorer "thinks" in this case.
In all other browsers a non-existing JS file is just ignored. No warning at the error console etc. (Ok, this could be improved here, too).
Please also take a look at the corresponding bug report. Any idea if this is a real IE7/Vista bug?
Filed under: Development, Technical
By Sebastian Werner @ June 25, 2007 10:30 am
I have just spend some minutes to update my wordfile for Ultraedit to correctly handle and highlight qooxdoo 0.7 JavaScript code. This is optimized for typical qooxdoo formatting and class declaration. It works well with my preferred indention of 2 spaces. For other indentions it needs a little modification to correctly detect all functions. BTW: Ultraedit has no possibility to differ between static and normal members. This is a result of the quite limited RegExp based matching. Download qooxdoo Wordfile for Ultraedit
Observers of our commit mailing list may already have seen that there was a lot of development in a new "qx.html2" package during the last days. Most things were not even alpha at this point and could just be seen as technical evaluation and test. It was interesting for us, and meant as an early investigation, of how we could improve the usefulness of qooxdoo's richness even in simpler, more HTML/DOM oriented web sites or mini applications. It is also listed as a goal for 0.8 to bring more qooxdoo features to a lower level to improve the adaption of qooxdoo in this market.
Finally the newly created classes (especially qx.html2.Element) are the first step to replace the widget focused implementation of DOM element handling and separate it. The current implementation supports all the features previously covered by the element and display queue (both quite internal widget technology). The big news is that the new implementation of this technology is nowhere widget oriented and could be used for simple DOM manipulation needs, too.
This element class allows the user to setup styles, configure attributes and add children or HTML content. All these things happen in memory first and are applied to the elements (which are only created if they become visible) later. The whole DOM manipulation to handle children (which is quite limited) is also covered by this new implementation with a lot of additional features. Children will be appended to each other in the optimal way e.g. inner nodes first, other (visible) nodes last. (It may be the first implementation of DOM manipulation based on the ideas of Edit Distance. Thanks to Fabian for your great help here.)
There are two new documents online in our wiki which describe two of the challenges for 0.8. The first article deal with the above mentioned topic. And the other one gives an earlier preview how to work around the box model limitations of recent qooxdoo versions to make it possible to use qooxdoo applications in standard compliant documents, too.
If the previous qooxdoo releases were said to be evolutionary, the final 0.7 release certainly is revolutionary.
We are proud to present this major qooxdoo release as the result of many people's ground-breaking development work and excellent user feedback. On the one hand qooxdoo 0.7 can be seen as a logical and consistent advancement that shares most of the spirit and focus of the previous versions. On the other hand, though, many aspects of the framework have been critically re-thought, re-implemented from scratch and entirely new concepts have been introduced. Much of what was regarded state-of-the-art in previous releases has been pushed even further for an optimal combination of power, elegance and speed. Many features and concepts are now quite mature and sophisticated, so that we can say with a certain relief: "This time we did it right!".
The unparalleled feature set has been realized in a development process that spans several months and involves quite a number of developers dedicated to the project full-time or part-time. The new concepts and implementations have been put to the test in two alpha and three beta releases. Many thanks for all the great feedback and contribution from the qooxdoo community!
Some of the most significant changes and additions in qooxdoo 0.7 are the following:
Browser history manager (cross-browser back button support; bookmarkability)
Fast, modular API viewer that supports all the advanced OO features
Integrated unit testing framework ("Test runner" application)
Brand new demo browser as a replacement for the prehistoric sample section
We hope you enjoy the feature set and consistency of this major release. Of course, there is convenient built-in support available to migrate your applications to qooxdoo 0.7.
