Release Schedules

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Martin Wittemann

We’d like to give you updates on the planned releases. The plans have briefly been mentioned in previous posts like the recent news about the big improvements to the desktop widget layer. The regular roadmap page has a summary of upcoming releases. Here are some more details:

Major release qooxdoo 3.0

The next release will be a significant update, particularly for qx.Desktop and its widget set. The release date as planned is 2013/07/17. Some of the highlights include:

qx.Core

HTTP backend mocking infrastructure
Cleanup of qx.lang namespace
Mouse emulation for touch devices
SCSS support in the toolchain
Mini webserver via toolchain
Live reload support
Tooling support for JSON schema, config file validation

qx.Desktop

Reduced DOM element count, down to one for each widget to increas performance
Overhauled decorator system based on pure CSS

qx.Website

REST layer module
More samples to the qx.Website API viewer
Support for this.base() superclass calls

qx.Mobile

Dynamic locale switch
Moving from LESS to SCSS
Retina display support
New widgets, e.g. drawer and collapsible

For more details, check out the resolved and open enhancements in bugzilla.

Maintenance release 2.1.2

Adhering to our double release scheme there will also be a qooxdoo 2.1.2 release at the same time as 3.0.

Minor release 3.1

Another release, qooxdoo 3.1, is planned for the end of November 2013.

So we’ve got seven weeks from now to get everything together for the next major release. As usual we keep you updated on what’s going into master – and with that into the next releases. Make sure you keep following at least the weekly blog posts.

qooxdoo 2.1.1 released

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Martin Wittemann

A new patch release of the framework is available!

qooxdoo 2.1.1 includes more than 70 bugfixes over the previous qooxdoo 2.1 release. Some of the fixes focus on better support for the most recent or upcoming browsers, e.g.:

CSS placeholders continue to work in Firefox 19 and above (they broke qooxdoo apps in previous Firefox betas).
Vendor-specific CSS names are handled correctly in IE.

Other fixed issues in the framework include:

Migration no longer produces potentially corrupt code.
Amount of resource files could be reduced for application builds.

As a patch release qooxdoo 2.1.1 is fully backwards-compatible to the previous version. Nothing needs to be changed in your existing apps, if they are based on qooxdoo 2.1. When upgrading from a prior version, you can migrate directly to 2.1.1.

Download qooxdoo 2.1.1. Checkout the detailed release notes and the manual.

Many thanks from the core developers to the community, particularly for reporting issues and your help in improving the framework.

qooxdoo 2.0.4 released

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Martin Wittemann

A new patch release of the framework is available!

qooxdoo 2.0.4 is to address a single issue in Firefox 19 and above: In earlier beta versions of Firefox they changed the CSS selectors for styling placeholders in textfields. Unfortunately, the changes could break JavaScript applications; apps based on qooxdoo 2.0 and above wouldn’t start in those beta versions. Meanwhile Mozilla changed the behavior in the latest Firefox betas from throwing an exception to simply ignoring the selector. Nevertheless, we wanted to provide a qooxdoo release with a proper fix on the framework side.

As a patch release qooxdoo 2.0.4 is fully backwards-compatible to the previous version. Nothing needs to be changed in your existing apps, if they are based on qooxdoo 2.0.x. When upgrading from a prior version, you can migrate directly to 2.0.4. Moreover, we suggest to update to latest stable release, e.g. qooxdoo 2.1.1.

Download qooxdoo 2.0.4, checkout the release notes.

qooxdoo 2.1 released

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Andreas Ecker

We are happy to announce a new release of the framework, qooxdoo 2.1.

Many thanks go to the entire community for making this happen: the team of core developers, 1&1 as the supporting company, all contributors, and last but not least the users and enthusiasts who brought in questions, comments and suggestions.

General

Internet Explorer 10 is now fully supported. This allows qooxdoo to target new platforms such as Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8. Leverage free tools like Apache Cordova ("PhoneGap") to even create native apps either for Windows 8 and Windows RT or for Windows Phone 8.

A Tutorial application was introduced to interactively guide new users through some fundamental desktop and mobile samples. This complements existing ways to get started with qooxdoo, e.g. the Playground or written tutorials for desktop and mobile.

Website

qooxdoo's website-oriented features have been around as a pre-built library, typically called "q" due to its top-level namespace. To avoid conflicts with your environment, you may now also use alternative identifiers.

New modules were added, e.g. for local Storage, Placeholder support in form fields, Placement of DOM elements and client-side Messaging.

Cross-browser Animations got further improved. For instance, Animated Scrolling is now available in the Manipulating module. Moreover, you have more ways to control and finetune animations, e.g. for iteration, delay or start events.

Two demo applications, the website variant of the Feedreader as well as the Todo app, were rebuilt using q. The latter app takes advantage of the Storage module.

Mobile

As already mentioned, the new IE10 support allows the mobile framework to embrace the family of Windows 8, particularly Windows Phone 8. For instance try the Mobile Showcase, now enhanced by a "Maps" page and the “Events” page to nicely demostrate multi-touch events.

The mobile widget set now ships with some awesome additions: Carousel, Picker, scrollable TextArea or Canvas.

Some other improvements: The layout of mobile forms has been polished. All widgets now include convenient transform functions (rotation, scale and translate). And a mobile view for unit testing is available.

Desktop

Dynamic Theme Switching is a great new feature when supporting several themes for an app; it not only makes development of custom themes faster, it can also be included with the final app: see the Theme dropdowns in either Demobrowser or Widgetbrowser.

Animations also make it into the desktop widget set: fade in, fade out or scroll animations can easily be applied to those rich interfaces.

The VirtualTree, a widget for handling even huge hierarchical data sets very efficiently, now offers advanced capabilities to filter and sort items.

Tooling

The toolchain is an integral and powerful part of the qooxdoo SDK. For many typical usecases it is now faster and more robust. It comes with a new JS parser, also to adapt to future language additions.

Code validation is performed by a dedicated tool (a.k.a. the "lint" job), but also by the compiler when generating an app. Those two warning systems have been unified into one, along with improvements in validating JS and JSON files.

Writing API documentation can be error-prone. Now developers benefit from a stricter parsing and analysis of JSDoc comments, including checks for parameter types, return values and other possible inconsistencies.

When working in a team of developers, or when incorporating code from several sources, a consistent coding style is beneficial. The pretty-print feature was revamped and includes some handy features for reformatting code, such as limiting the length of code lines.

Check it out!

qooxdoo 2.1 is available for download. Check out the detailed release notes and the manual. Watch the code repository on GitHub.

The qooxdoo 2.1 release comes with many substantial improvements and exciting new features. In fact almost 300 bugfixes and enhancements made it into the release.

Thanks

Many thanks from the core developers to the community of contributors and users. Please help to spread the news, get people excited about the latest release, and show them how to deploy qooxdoo as a truly universal JavaScript framework.

Enjoy!