"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.

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.