Today another pre-release qooxdoo 0.8-alpha2 was made available. This milestone completes and stabilizes many of the exciting feature improvements and additions of 0.8. To get an idea of the sophisticated GUI toolkit, you may want to browse through the online demos.

Being an alpha release don't expect it to be complete in terms of features or API just yet. But if you read the comprehensive release notes, you'll see how this second release is an amazing improvement over alpha1. Even if it is not meant for production use, you should start to make yourself more familiar with the new stuff of the upcoming version 0.8.

Download this alpha release as a regular SDK or in form of other packages. Take the time to play with it and maybe try to prototype some new apps. It would be great to get your feedback. If you find any issues, please don't hesitate to post bug reports.

Today qooxdoo 0.8-alpha1 was released as planned. It is an early alpha release that includes and demonstrates many of the exciting feature improvements and additions of 0.8.

Being a first alpha release it is neither regarded feature-complete nor API-final. One goal of this release is to provide a useful code base for first attempts at experimenting with qooxdoo 0.8 features, e.g. during the power workshops at the upcoming conferences. It is not meant for production use.

Nevertheless, feedback from you while taking a closer look and simply “playing” with this preview of qooxdoo 0.8 is highly appreciated! For more info please see the release notes.

Download the alpha release as a regular SDK or in form of other packages.

In our constant quest for cross-platform compatibility we are especially proud to announce support for the legendary Netscape Navigator 4 browsers with qooxdoo 0.8. This browser, in its latest stable 4.08 release, has had a major impact on Internet usage and browser experience, and still maintains a small but die-hard community of users (Netscape's shares of the browser market total at about 0.68%).

This is another step forward to show qooxdoo's commitment to real world technologies and to help protect existing investments. We are particularly happy to present qooxdoo support for this platform in the 10th anniversary of its most recent release.

Happy Birthday, Netscape 4!

With the recent release of Safari 3.1 the WebKit team has completely reworked the handling of key events. John Resig has an interesting blog article with some details. Safari 3.1 now behaves pretty much like Internet Explorer and is in general much more sane than before. For instance, all those strange key codes larger than 64000 for special keys are gone and finally modifier keys like "shift" and "control" fire key events as well. Interestingly, Safari is now the first browser to support the key identifier property defined in the DOM level 3 event specification. In qooxdoo we already emulate this property in key events for quite some time now, and it really helps to simplify key handler code in our widgets.

Unfortunately, this change in Safari 3.1 broke the existing qooxdoo key event handler. But it is already fixed and available in our subversion repository for legacy_0_7_x branch and trunk. The fix was basically to detect the current WebKit version and use the existing Internet Explorer key handler code also for Safari 3.1 and above. Since all browser quirks are handled separately this was a pretty simple fix. Of course, it will be part of the next minor release 0.7.4 as well as the final 0.8. If you need Safari 3.1 support now, please checkout the latest version from the legacy_0_7_x branch.

We are happy to announce a new release of the qooxdoo Web Toolkit. QWT is a qooxdoo-contrib project that provides an alternative, Java-only programming model for the qooxdoo JavaScript framework.

It allows you to create qooxdoo applications just by leveraging Java technology - no HTML, CSS, DOM nor JavaScript knowledge is needed. You can take full advantage of the typical Java IDE features (like auto-completion, etc.) while coding your application. The Java source code is automatically transformed into the qooxdoo JavaScript equivalent before deployment.

Version 0.2.0 of QWT features a simplified installation, MS Windows support and Reverse Ajax (a.k.a. Comet, still experimental).

Just download it, installation should be a piece of cake. For more information please have a look at the QWT documentation.

The project is still in its early stages, any of your feedback and contribution is appreciated. Have fun.

To streamline our web site and simplify the way information is delivered to you, we have merged the blog and the news section into one, under the news label. The old blog URL (blog.qooxdoo.org) is still available, but all new posts will show up under the news URL. Please update your bookmarks and feeds.

We are happy to announce a comprehensive maintenance release qooxdoo 0.7.3. It includes many bugfixes and improvements that any qooxdoo application should benefit from. It is recommended that existing custom applications built with previous qooxdoo versions are being migrated to this stable and mature release.

Besides the many bugfixes, there are a few new features to mention:

• Cross-browser logging features based on Firebug Lite
• A source-code validation utility similar to JSLint, executed by a simple "make lint"
• Re-worked feedreader to demonstrate best practices for application development
• Early preview of the next-generation build tool generator2.

For more information about the many bugfixes and other improvements of 0.7.3 please see the detailed release notes. Be careful that a very small number of changes (particularly related to theming the virtual table widget) might effect your custom application and require manual adjustments. Other than that migration to the current release should be fairly easy, since the (semi-)automatic migration support doesn't really have anything to cover. Most changes were made "under the hood".

Thanks to all the people that not only noticed some problems, but made them known to everybody else by either posting to the mailing list or opening a ticket in bugzilla. Some community members took the chance to further analyse, and fix some issues, and contribute them back to the project. Whatever your involvement into this open source project is, it is highly appreciated.

Enjoy the new release!

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Testing web apps in general and qooxdoo apps in particular has been a recurring issue in the community (e.g. see this wiki page and the links provided here).

The new Simulator project aims to facilitate testing of qooxdoo apps through integration with Selenium, a popular, open-source web testing framework. The nice thing about Selenium is that it also lends itself well to automating web pages ("simulations"), hence the name.

The project is still in its early stage, its main contribution being a qooxdoo-specific extension to the Selenium engine. This extension adds commands and so called locators to Selenium that hook into qooxdoo's object system and ease the way a test interacts with qooxdoo. If you are concerned with testing qooxdoo apps, or are already using Selenium for your work, this qooxdoo-contrib contribution might be interesting. Other parts of the project include a small sample application with an interactive Selenium shell and ready-to-run test scripts that can also be used as templates for your own endeavours.

Check it out and visit the Simulator project home page.

we are proud to announce the first official release of QWT, the "qooxdoo Web Toolkit". In short this contribution to the qooxdoo framework is like "qooxdoo for Java": Write your qooxdoo application in Java, and QWT will translate the client part into a pure JavaScript application. It is quite similar to GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, but with QWT you can use the high-quality qooxdoo widgets and its comprehensive set of classes.

Have a look at the preliminary QWT homepage and give it a try. Please use the regular qooxdoo-contrib-devel mailing list for feedback and discussion.

Cheers,

Michael

We are proud to announce another bug fix and enhancement release of qooxdoo 0.7.x. While we are spending most of our development time with the new features of qooxdoo 0.8, there have also been some improvements in the stable branch which lead to this new minor version. The highlights of this version are:

A major rework of the rendering logic of the table widget which dramatically improves its performance, especially regarding the scrolling performance. The largest improvement should be visible in Internet Explorer. Thanks to Fabian for his tremdenous work. I think this converts the table from a feature rich table to a feature rich table which performs really well.

qooxdoo 0.7.2 includes a new application called buildtool. This application allows you to configure the Makefile of any qooxdoo application (must be skeleton based) using a nice web interface. It comes with a mini web server to handle the file IO stuff. This is just a first snapshot but works well enough for an initial presentation.

A really long awaited feature is finally included as well: A search feature for the API viewer. You can now easily search the whole API for specific methods, events, properties, etc. You can use this feature in every skeleton based qooxdoo application, too. A simple "make api" now generates the index file for your application so you can search your application classes as well. Many thanks to Stefan for this new feature.

A bunch of new cell renderers and cell editors were added to this release. Thanks to Christian for his work. Now you can for example even better use the table widget as a property editor.

The test runner application is now better integrated into the build system and allows skeleton users to integrate the test runner into their applications. Using this test runner users are easily able to create custom unit tests for their APIs and classes.

Thanks to a backport of some classes created for qooxdoo 0.8 we were able to fix some long outstanding issues regarding typical location finding issues when not using qooxdoo in an application layout but in traditional web pages. In these cases scrolling areas often made problems and lead to wrong positioned menus and combobox lists etc. These issues should now be fixed thanks to Fabians backporting.

There were many other changes and improvements. Please have a look at the release notes.

Enjoy this new release!

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