As planned the Open Source RIA Framework qooxdoo is available in a new release 0.8.2. It is quite a comprehensive maintenance release, with many improvements and bugfixes over the previous version. For more info please see the detailed release notes.

Inspector

qooxdoo 0.8.2 is quite easy to setup, straightforward to use and fun to play with. The framework now also introduces support for live debugging your applications (try it out online for debugging qooxdoo's feedreader demo). Think of the new Inspector tool as a cross-browser Firebug. But being a qooxdoo application itself it runs in any supported browser, particularly in those that are hard to debug natively like IE 6 or 7.

Some of the Inspector's handy features: you can locate real qooxdoo widgets visually with the mouse and then modify them in a suitable property window or a built-in JavaScript console. Additionally it lets you examine the hierarchy of widgets of your user interface, or keep an eye on qooxdoo’s central object registry. While there certainly is much room for improvement (with many features in the pipeline), Inspector is already such a useful tool for cross-environment app development, that qooxdoo users should take advantage of it rather sooner than later.

Browser support

This release went through one of the most comprehensive testing phases of any qooxdoo release. Backed by continuous integration leveraging a system for automated build, unit and application testing and reporting, a wide set of browsers and operating systems has been covered. This includes not only the common web browsers IE6, IE7, FF2, FF3, Safari 3, Opera 9 or Chrome, but also “beta” versions like IE8 RC1, FF3.1b, Safari 4 beta, WebKit nightly.

jQuery-like low-level layer

Another exciting addition to the framework is a powerful pure-JavaScript CSS3 selector engine. qooxdoo integrates John Resig's excellent Sizzle project, which is at the heart of many JavaScript low-level libraries like jQuery. While creating rich internet applications in qooxdoo typically does not require to get in touch with DOM-oriented features, it is nonetheless a useful complementary API for basic web development. qooxdoo 0.8.2 therefore introduces a jQuery-like coding style and chaining concept around its existing low-level layer. Unlike the selector feature this API for conveniently working on collections of elements is still experimental, but is included in this release to gather feedback from early adopters.

Data binding & Virtual Widgets

Two other experimental features are provided as technical previews in the qooxdoo 0.8.2 release: The first one is an advanced data binding layer, that is expected to significantly guide future RIA development in qooxdoo. The other feature is a bottom-up infrastructure for virtual widgets, which allows to create interface elements that can display huge amounts of data without performance penalty (aka data tables or grids).

Use it

qooxdoo 0.8.2 is recommended as an upgrade to existing applications, migration should be straightforward (but you should carefully read the migration notes). Being the latest stable version it is also perfect for new users to easily get started with qooxdoo.Download and enjoy the new 0.8.2 release.

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

In qooxdoo we have two virtual widgets, the Table and the TreeVirtual. These widgets are virtual in the sense that they only create HTML markup for the visible part of the data. This enables us to render tables which can display any number of rows. The (scrolling) performance is only limited by the number of table cells displayed on the screen and not by the amount of data. Being used in almost all qooxdoo projects the Table is probably the most used complex qooxdoo widget. Over time many people have contributed to the Table and added new features. The result is that the Table can be adapted for many different uses but at the cost of a complex API and a rather monolithic code base. It is not possible to reuse only parts of the table. It's an all-or-nothing situation.

In spite of all these features there are some use cases which still cannot be satisfied by the current Table. Two often requested features which touch the core of the Table are:

1. Virtual horizontal scrolling: The Table generates only HTML markup for full rows. This slows down tables with a lot of columns.
2. Variable row heights: All rows in the Table always have the same height. It is not possible to give specific rows an individual height.

We plan to apply the lessons we have learned with the Table to a more general infrastructure for virtual widgets. The core will be a virtual pane, which will support virtual scrolling in both directions together with variable row and column sizes. This pane itself will have no external dependencies to other parts of the Table. One design goal is that this infrastructure can be used to create different kinds of virtual widgets. Other widgets, which would benefit from virtual rendering, include a gallery/icon list, combo boxes or trees.

Don't be afraid, the old Table is not going to silently disappear. We will continue to fix bugs and distribute it with future releases but expect new features to appear in the new Table.

We are very interested in user feedback. What do you like about the qooxdoo table? What do you dislike? Right now we are collecting ideas, features and use cases for this project on a wiki page. Feel feel to add your ideas, or leave a comment to this blog.

This year there's a special gift under the Xmas tree: qooxdoo 0.8.1.

It is quite a comprehensive maintenance release, with a lot of bugs fixed (about 250) since the 0.8 release. Many inconsistencies were resolved, carefully features completed and missing API added. qooxdoo 0.8.1 is recommended as an upgrade for existing 0.8-based applications, migration should be straightforward. This release should also be used by any new users getting started with qooxdoo.

The framework again proofed to quite easily adapt to the various browsers (and browser versions). Especially the state-of-the-art GUI toolkit (introduced with 0.8) and the framework's layered architecture allow for a wide support of all common browsers, even including the latest betas. This time with Google Chrome 1.0 adding to the mix of Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, there's plenty of runtimes to choose from for your fully cross-browser qooxdoo application.

There have been many improvements for 0.8.1 - all over the framework. For more info please see the detailed release notes. Of course, there haven't only been improvements in the JavaScript framework part of qooxdoo, but also in the accompanying tooling part. For creating impressive rich internet applications (RIAs), one needs to have such a powerful developer tool chain. In 0.8.1 it got further tweaked and pushed, sometimes dropping or replacing inappropriate config options. Feedback to the ongoing progress in this field is always appreciated.

While it should be trivial to setup and use qooxdoo's tool chain for creating and developing applications, some potential users do not feel comfortable enough to do so, for instance when in a hurry evaluating frameworks. There should be an easier way to get a first impression of qooxdoo, at least of the JavaScript coding part. For that purpose a new interactive application was introduced with 0.8.1 called "Playground". It allows you to type in and modify code in a syntax-highlighting editor, and immediately turn that into a live qooxdoo application in the same browser window. There are some samples included as a starting point for your own experiments. Please keep in mind that this brand new app is not meant to be some sort of online IDE, it really just is a playground for some interactive qooxdoo coding experience. It certainly has its limitations and issues. Anyway, let us know if you like it and what could be improved.

There are now six demo apps that come with the framework and are also available online: Demo Browser and Playground for exploring qooxdoo code and features; Feed Reader and Portal to showcase RIA-style and low-level applications; finally API Viewer and Test Runner for either documentation or unit testing.

Download and enjoy the new 0.8.1 release.

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

Yes, a new release is out the door. Please note, this time it's for the legacy line 0.7.x. The latest and greatest qooxdoo version is still 0.8.

qooxdoo 0.7.4 is a genuine maintenance/bugfixing release. Many issues have been resolved, also due to some great feedback from and collaboration with the community. There are no known API changes, so it should be a fine replacement for a 0.7.3 version. Of course, some of the behavior may have changed a bit compared to the previous version, but only to make things more consistent and to behave as expected.

For some more detailed info about fixes and changes, please see the release notes. Of course, there are the usual demos, but keep in mind that it's a legacy version. Any new users of qooxdoo should go for 0.8.

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

I have just checked in the initial qooxdoo TextMate bundle into qooxdoo-contrib. TextMate is a very popular editor on the Mac, which is very easy to extend. Some time ago I started to hack on a TextMate bundle for qooxdoo just for fun. Thanks to some requests from the community and from my Mac using colleagues Jonny and Martin, I polished the old bundle, added some support for qooxdoo 0.8 and checked it in. You can easily give it a try by following the installation instructions in our wiki.

The bundle is still very basic. It supports building and running the application (Both source and build versions). Further it is able to verify the validity of the JavaScript code and checking it using qooxdoo's lint program.

I would like to encourage everyone to help growing this bundle. There are many simple yet very useful ways everyone can contribute. E.g. I would like to see much more code snipplets for common qooxdoo constructs and maybe some file templates to create new files. Let me know if you want to contribute.

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -- Mark Twain

Why am I quoting this? Well, my desire for new adventures has gotten the best of me once more…Tuesday September 16th will be my last day with 1&1 and I’m off to join StudiVz (Wikipedia), a social networking platform for students, in particular college and university students in Europe. A little more about that in a moment, but first I wanted to say a few things regarding my current employment.

My time at 1&1

I joined 1&1 more than six years ago to grow, learn, do "stuff that matters" and have fun while doing it. I started in the online production, simple websites became more feature rich and I focused on JavaScript over time. Later I continued in the core development. During my time there, almost four years ago, Andreas and myself started with qooxdoo to find out how to improve web applications to make them richer and more impressive than ever before. qooxdoo is a awesome piece of software. I really enjoyed developing it.

At this point, it would be appropriate to call out some of the people I admire and that have influenced me in many positive ways and provided me with support and great advice while at 1&1, but the list would be too long, and I'd risk missing people out. So, look, you know who you are - and I thank you Many thanks to all the qooxdooers outside as well. It is a pleasure working with all of you!

So now on to StudiVz

I will move from the qooxdoo "headquarters" in Karlsruhe to Germany's exciting capital Berlin. It is a trip of 700 kilometers which means about five hours using the train. I'll be joining as the team leader frontend and will improve the whole interface of StudiVz to make it even more attractive and appealing. StudiVz is one of the biggest network portal players in the European market. Still quite a small company compared to 1&1, with currently under 200 employees.

But they have some impressive guys there. The interview was really interesting and I am still fascinated by their ideas and future plans. Thriving such a product to improve upon their current efforts is definitely a cool job. Berlin is also a very interesting and attractive city. Never planned to live there, but the parts I have seen recently are definitely worth at least a visit.

What's about qooxdoo?

qooxdoo, a "baby" of mine. Yes, I love this piece of software. I spent uncountable hours in developing and improving qooxdoo. Maybe I have to mention, that one of the most important tasks for me during the whole qooxdoo progress was to get this new layouting and theming into a release. I think this is the most important milestone for qooxdoo development since 0.1. And finally it's done.

For me this step means an interesting new option in my career with many ways to improve upon my current knowledge and experience. It means human responsibility and even more influence on software architecture. At the beginning I start with a small team of three or four developers, planned to increase to over ten over the first half year.

For sure I'll closely follow the qooxdoo development in the future and intend to spend a few hours each week to keep in touch with the newest development. But to be fair, my main job will be to improve StudiVz and not to improve qooxdoo. I hope to convince my new collegues at StudiVz to use qooxdoo. I personally really want to continue to use qooxdoo! Hopefully it will be possible to contribute new features to qooxdoo as well over time.

Finally

I can tell you this today - StudiVz is cool, the oh-my-that's-the-coolest-thing-I've-seen-and-I-want-to-be-a-part-of-it-kind-of-cool-thing that gets me very excited. Hey, it had to be to take me away from a job, the people, the company and a city I love!

Finally, here it is: the most amazing piece of software we ever released.

qooxdoo 0.8 is a milestone, for sure. Unlike the minor jump in version number may suggest, this release includes tons of changes and improvements over the previous 0.7.3. It is impossible to account for all changes here, it's even hard for the most significant ones. So if you haven't closely followed the development of qooxdoo 0.8, you may just go ahead and see yourself to get an idea.

There have been two main areas that improved substantially: GUI toolkit and developer tool chain.

GUI Toolkit

qooxdoo 0.8 features a complete rewrite of the GUI toolkit. It is state-of-the-art and supports all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). The GUI toolkit has a layered architecture: on-top of a low-level DOM-oriented layer (that might be used as a separate library), it includes a large set of widgets and layout managers (perfect for building RIAs). Online demos are available.

Users can very easily implement additional custom widgets or layouts to fit their individual needs. Theming of widgets continues to be independent from the widget code itself, and now allows for virtually unlimited styling possibilities, e.g. rounded borders, gradients, shadows. While qooxdoo comes with two new attractive themes, it is also easy to create custom themes, without any CSS knowledge required.

Special thanks go to ERGOSIGN, a leading provider of user interface design services. In a close and fruitful collaboration we created the new default theme, that nicely demonstrates some of the UI capabilities of qooxdoo 0.8. Indulge in the so-called "Modern" theme!

Tool Chain

Besides the exciting changes in the GUI toolkit, the developer tool chain has also been improved tremendously. The built-in tools free the developer from tedious and complex tasks and also aid in development.

Unlike the previous versions, which featured a Makefile-based build process and required Windows users to install and use Cygwin, in 0.8 all that ceremony is gone: Essentially, all that's needed is a working Python installation, which is trivial to setup on any operating system, including MS Windows.

With those low entrance hurdles any user should greatly benefit from the power of the integrated tool chain. There are too many features of 0.8 tooling to be mentioned here, but some highlights include image combination, integrated internationalization support, JSON-based configuration, etc. Of course, also API doc generation and unit testing.

Getting Started

API documentation is progressing towards full coverage. The wiki-based user manual of 0.8 is being updated and improved to account for all the changes and improvements.

It has never been easier to get started with qooxdoo: Download the qooxdoo 0.8 SDK package, unzip it, and see the included index.html for next steps in creating a hello world application.

Development

See the impressive number of commits over the time span of qooxdoo 0.8 development:

You notice the drop in 0.8 development activity end of last year? At that time we successfully supported and mastered large-scale qooxdoo application development. If you haven't checked out GMX.com, a large free webmail service, you should definitely do so. Some of the experience we gained from that task was also helping with the further development of qooxdoo 0.8.

Thanks

Many factors - but mostly people - play a key role in developing such a ground-breaking release. qooxdoo 0.8 could not have been possible without the many users, supporters, partners, contributors, developers and, of course, 1&1.

Thanks a lot for all your input, work and support!

Please see the release notes for a detailed list of changes. Go download and enjoy!

We are getting closer to qooxdoo 0.8 final: a first release candidate is available.

Please download the corresponding package and take it for a test drive. There are some open issues that are planned to be tackled within the next few days. It would be great if you could report all issues you find while working with qooxdoo 0.8-rc1. Documentation of qooxdoo 0.8 is in the works and should become more complete and accurate day-by-day.

There have been many improvements after the beta version, so checkout the detailed release notes, run some demos.

This is good news, so why only announce it in the recent weekly status update? Exactly, so check out the release notes of qooxdoo 0.8-beta1, try the online demos and make yourself more familiar with all the cool new stuff of 0.8.

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.