Welcome to another summary of activities that took place during the week:

The Ajax Experience

But first, here is some feedback from Fabian's participation at this year's TAE:

"Last week I (Fabian) represented qooxdoo at The Ajax Experience in Boston. On Sunday Dan Hummon, Derrell Lipman and me did a tiny qooxdoo user group meeting in a very familiar atmosphere at Derrell's home. Thank you Derrell for the invitation, it is always exciting to meet and talk to qooxdoo users and co-developers in person.
You can check out the slides from slideshare. I expect the recorded audio to be published on ajaxian.com later this year."

Commands

The former commands' main feature was merely an abstraction of keyboard inputs in a central place. But we wanted to extend the feature set of the command to also address requirements that are found in a typical ui layer. Something that has also been brought up before by some qooxdoo users. The main idea was to add some common properties of command-using widgets to the command themselves and let the command configure the referencing widget. Therefore, we moved the original (low-level) command from qx.event.Command to qx.bom.Shortcut to make it more visible in the bom package. The new (ui-level) command, which includes the new properties as mentioned, can be found in qx.ui.core.Command.

Unfortunately, the new demo, which is to show you the benefits, is currently broken in the online snapshot of the devel version. Till that is fixed, you may want to check out the SVN trunk version, sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: The new demo, which is to show you the benefits, is online.

New test jobs

Two new generator jobs have been introduced: test-inline and test-native. Unlike the regular test job, which creates a test application inheriting from qx.application.Standalone, these will generate test applications extending qx.application.Inline and qx.application.Native, respectively. This allows developers working on Inline or Native applications to run their unit tests in the same kind of application. See the Test Runner wiki page for details.

Generator

A small, but hopefully helpful snippet has entered the wiki, about how to create a customized API viewer that includes the class documentation of additional qooxdoo libraries and contributions you might use in your application. The page about the default generator jobs has been revamped, and now includes a section about so called includer jobs, jobs that are not directly runnable by the generator but can be used to customize other default jobs.

Bugfixes

Quite a number of bugs were fixed for the MenuBar, e.g. #2806, #2813, #2826, #2827. As usual for a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

Smart Table Model

Dave Baggett has released his Smart Table Model contribution. In his announcement he writes:

"This should function as a drop-in replacement for the standard Simple model, but offers a bunch of new features that are especially useful for big and/or
complex tables. It was inspired by Dan Hummon's Filtered table model, but is
a complete rewrite from the ground up. Migration to this model should
address all of the filed issues with the existing Filtered table model. The
filtering mechanism works completely differently, however, so if you use
those capabilities you will need to change your code a bit."

See here for the full announcement.

WebTech conference

If you haven't heard about the WebTech yet, a newly introduced German web conference, you should check it out: it takes places on November 16 - 18, 2009 in Karlsruhe, were most of the core framework team at 1&1 is located. If you are interested in meeting the team (at least some of us will be around), either at the conference or for a decent after-conference beer and chat, just let us know.

That's it for today, see you around next time.

Welcome! It is one week after qooxdoo 0.8.3 saw the light of day, thanks for all the feedback we received so far. Keep it rolling! But, there is a road ahead and there is no standing still, so here we go...

Framework

Data binding

A key feature of the whole qooxdoo data binding layer is the data array, an array which fires events on every change. This is so important, because the binding needs to know every change to get all the data synchronized. We improved the array further more and fixed some minor issues. Additionally we experimented a bit with defineSetter and defineGetter for accessing the array items. We did get it running, but not very fast. And as long as defining the accessors is not available in all major browsers, we can't use it.

Another focus this week was to fix some issues in the list controller in combination with filtering. Due to the very complex binding structure, it was quite hard to get it working, but we finally managed it how it is supposed to be.

We introduced the modelSelection in the framework last week for all widgets handling a selection. This model selection was not really fitting into the binding landscape so we made some changes to get it into a state where it is easy bindable.

CSS color "grey" in Internet Explorer

The bug report #2766 shows that the British English spelling of the color name "grey",  which is a valid spelling for our current property system, makes problems in Internet Explorer. But what happens if the British English spelling is used?

If the value is set to the DOM element like

element.style.cssText = "background-Color: grey;";

IE6 and IE7 ignore the value and the background color isn't set on the DOM element. Only IE8 shows the background color. Why? Because the British English spelling isn't supported in IE6 and IE7, only the new IE8 supports both spelling forms.

But if the color is set like this

element.style.backgroundColor = "grey";

IE6 and IE7 stop with a script error: "Invalid property value". This stops the script execution which isn't really nice. Therefore, we decided to allow only the gray (American English) spelling, which is supported by all browsers.

Bugs

For a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

Search in Demobrowser

With every new feature, qooxdoo's Demobrowser is getting more and more demos. Currently, we have more than 230 demos available in the app. With that huge amount of demos, it was about time to introduce a search for the demos.

Tooling

Internationalization Data

A new experimental feature was added to the generator, to support forking out of internationalization (I18N) data in a generated application. I18N data for any app, currently translation mappings and CLDR data (like the date format), are by default included in the loader/boot package of the application. For big projects, with a lot of supported locales and a lot of translatable strings, this part of the loader can become really large.

To allow a better handling of the I18N data, and to speed up loading of the initial application package in the browser, we have added a configuration option to fork out this data into separate files. See here for more details.

Complex Name Spaces

Increasingly, people are using complex name spaces for their applications. They use things like "org.myorg.webclient" to follow a Java-like notation, or something like "webclient.pro.util" and "webclient.pro.ui" to partition a larger application under a common root. To that end, a new snippet document was added, which highlights some of the aspects of using complex name spaces in qooxdoo.

So much for today, see you around next time.

As planned the Open Source RIA Framework qooxdoo is available in a new release 0.8.3. It is quite a comprehensive release, with many improvements and bugfixes over the previous version. For more info please see the detailed release notes.

Some highlights of this release include:

• New Form Handling
• Unified Selection API
• Advanced Data Binding
• New FlowLayout
• New FlashWidget
• New ThemedIframe
• Global Error Handling
• and more ...

The following screenshot shows some features of the new form handling:

qooxdoo 0.8.3 is one of the best tested and most extensive releases to date. To get an idea, see some indicators for the development and testing that went into this release:

• about 1.700 Commits since last release
• about 300 Bug fixes
• more than 1.100 Unit tests (incl. more than 3.200 assertions)
• about 30 Browsers/OS combinations continuously unit-/GUI-tested
• about 160 GUI-tests of applications, fully automated

It is recommended that users upgrade their existing applications to this latest stable version. Migration should be straightforward (but you should carefully read the migration info in the release notes). As the latest stable version it is also perfect for new users to easily get started with qooxdoo. Download and enjoy the brand new 0.8.3 release.

Thanks to all the fellow developers, contributors and users of qooxdoo for their great support and collaboration!

Welcome back to a weekly blog post.

Renamings

You might have wondered recently about some new names among the core team members? Actually, it had a zero net effect: while Johnny led the way a while ago and took his wife's name upon marriage, it was Alex' turn this time. If you haven't already, get used to Jonathan "Johnny" Weiß and Alexander "Alex" Steitz. Guys, congrats again and the best of luck!

Form handling

If you have followed the recent weekly blog posts, you have surely noticed that we have made a lot of changes and improvements in the area of form widgets and the entire form management. In the course of those changes, we removed the former value property for widgets that manage a selection (e.g. SelectBox, RadioGroup, etc.). We got feedback from the community which liked the previous feature a lot, so we reintroduced it with an enhanced concept. If you are interested in this topic, please take a look at the corresponding issue report and see the comments for details.

Opera 10

You have certainly noticed the final release of Opera 10 this week. It's a modern and fast browser for sure, but it also gave us some headaches. We hit a problem that apparently the RCs had as well, which breaks the TestRunner and the whole browser badly. After some investigation we figured out that Opera 10 crashes if you assign an empty string to the message property of an error. Give the following code a try in an Opera 10 release (Windows or Mac, not Linux) and see the Opera O fall off the cliffs ...

try {
  var e = new Error();
  e.message = "";
  throw e;
} catch (e) {
   alert(e.message);
}

As a consequence of this, we decided to assign the qooxdoo base error a non-empty default message, so this issue won't affect you in the future.

Forum

A while ago we reminded you of the possibility to use Nabble as a web frontend to the regular qooxdoo mailing list. There is even a somewhat experimental embedded qooxdoo forum right within the homepage. When working more intensively with the Nabble forum ourselves, we noticed a few outages in their service, particularly the embedded forum. Since there are a number of you already using Nabble, what's your experience with the quality of their service?

The Ajax Experience

As reported Fabian will do a talk at the upcoming Ajax Experience, September 14-16 in Boston. If you happen to be at the conference (or at least in Boston at that time), it'd be great to have some sort of qooxdoo get-together.

Bugs

For a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.

Release 0.8.3

As announced on the mailing list already, we are in the process to prepare for a release qooxdoo 0.8.3 next week, Thu 2009-09-10. There are still some issues we'd like to address, but certainly it'll be a welcomed maintenance/bugfix release, also given the many existing improvements over 0.8.2. If you happen to be on SVN trunk (or try out the devel snapshots of the online apps that are updated each Friday) and you notice any critical issues, please report them asap so we might consider them for the release.

Thanks for your attention and support. Have a nice weekend.