For quite a long time now qooxdoo-contrib includes a WYSIWYG html editing widget called HtmlArea. During the last few weeks Jonathan and I have been busy improving the existing widget, and have now released a new version.
Since there are many other open source projects around with a similar technical approach, why haven't we just picked one of those and ported them to (or just used them with) qooxdoo? Well, we think we have a slightly different focus and goal in mind than the other projects: We wanted to create a solid, clean cross-browser widget, focusing on a fundamental set of functionality rather than a full-blown WYSIWYG editor. HtmlArea intends to support all the four major browsers that include basic html editing capability in their most recent versions. Well, to be fair, that is a long-term goal, with IE and Firefox currently getting more love than Safari or Opera.

Today we released a new version HtmlArea 0.2 with the following features:

• Text formatting
  • font family
  • font size
  • font weight
  • text decoration
  • font style
  • text color
  • background color
  • text indention
• Complete Undo / Redo handling
• Insertion of HTML elements
  • table
  • image
  • list
  • horizontal ruler
• Easily expendable to insert custom HTML

See a simple live demo.

In a future release we would like to include some kind of plug-in architecture which would allow for an easier development of extensions to HTMLArea. We also think about different feature sets (e.g. basic, simple and advanced) for different users' needs. Please also note that one of the next versions will target qooxdoo 0.8 and might not work with previous qooxdoo versions.

Let us know what you think about HtmlArea so far. The infrastructure of qooxdoo-contrib allows anyone to contribute to qooxdoo quite easily - either by collaborating on existing features or on starting and maintaining new ones.

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.

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.