Adobe AIR is a new system to allow typical web applications to better integrate in the desktop. This includes access to file system resources, a local SQL database, and a controlable chrome for the "browser" window and some other goodies. The whole thing uses Webkit to render HTML pages. This is a great choice -- for qooxdoo based applications Webkit currently easily outperforms the other engines.

I have integrated AIR into the build system (trunk only). For a small demonstration I have created an AIR based API-Viewer of the current trunk. This can be used as an offline application. Including all API data the download is about 700 KB which is really small. (I had to zip the download again because of security limitations features of wordpress.)

In the current trunk each skeleton based application can be converted to an AIR application easily. Just execute "make air" in the root folder of your application. Unfortunately this feature required changes in a lot of files. This will be a trunk-only feature for now and will not be backported to legacy_0_7_x.

Download AIR based qooxdoo API Viewer (r9197)

We are pretty excited to present qooxdoo as one of the key frameworks at the upcoming The Ajax Experience. This conference, July 25-27, 2007 in San Francisco, is one of the most authoritative events for developers looking to learn about Ajax and next generation web applications. Therefore, it is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the power and vision of qooxdoo.

The qooxdoo development team will be represented by Sebastian Werner, Derrell Lipman and myself. There will be a talk about qooxdoo and as a sponsor of TAE we will be available for personal discussion at our exhibition booth as well. I am sure that qooxdoo will surprise and convince many attendees, particularly those who didn't know much about qooxdoo before.

It would be great to meet many qooxdoo users at this event and have some interesting discussion. If you happen to live in the Bay area but you won't attend TAE, just drop me a note and let us figure out a chance to meet - and probably have a beer or two

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

We were just offered a limited number of guest passes that we may give away for free. Anyone interested in attending the conference, please hurry up an let me know immediately ! Good luck.

Last month's release qooxdoo 0.7 was regarded a "quantum leap" that introduced many advanced features into the framework. It has been well-received and users seem to enjoy it as a mature platform for their custom application development. Now qooxdoo has been made even more stable by two maintenance releases for both the latest trunk as well as the latest legacy branch.

Before the upcoming challenges of qooxdoo 0.8 that will, for instance, include an in-depth reimplementation of the layout engine, work has recently concentrated on resolving many open issues in the existing code base. Various parts of the framework have seen quite a large number of bugfixes, including minor and long-pending issues. In the course of bugfixing, a lot of performance improvements, especially for Internet Explorer, have been included as well. Most fixes were particularly relevant for the current trunk and led to the brand-new maintenance release 0.7.1. That part of fixes that were either 0.6.x specific or could be backported to the legacy 0.6.x branch in reasonable time, led to the other maintenance release 0.6.7. All remaining issues were reorganized in bugzilla to allow for a more efficient workflow and user contribution in the future.

Among all the additions and substantial changes two exciting new features of 0.7.1 deserve closer attention: First, building upon the new support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP) in qooxdoo, cross-browser JavaScript profiling has been made available. It can easily be switched on for a fine-grained benchmarking of any qooxdoo application, either in its development version ("source") or its deployment version ("build").

The second fundamental addition is an entire infrastructure set up to allow for an easier integration of contributions from the qooxdoo community: As an integral part of the qooxdoo project an additional repository called "qooxdoo-contrib" is now available that makes collaborative development and promotion of user contributions a lot simpler than in the past. Less restrictive SVN access, framework-independent versioning and perfect integration with the qooxdoo framework itself provide a very developer-friendly infrastructure. This concise environment is also used as an incubator for new and experimental features introduced by the qooxdoo core developers. Any feedback is appreciated to make this contribution and incubator infrastructure as attractive and as easy-to-use as possible for all members of the qooxdoo community.

Thanks again to all the users for reporting bugs, helping to resolve any pending issues, their ideas and contributions! Your help and ongoing support is really appreciated and makes developing qooxdoo a lot of fun. Enjoy!

• Release notes for 0.7.1
• Download of 0.7.1 (Latest Stable)

• Release notes for 0.6.7
• Download of 0.6.7 (Latest Legacy)

• Rate qooxdoo