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.

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.

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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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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Last month's release qooxdoo 0.7 was regarded a "quantum leap" that introduced many advanced features into the framework. It has been well-received and users seem to enjoy it as a mature platform for their custom application development. Now qooxdoo has been made even more stable by two maintenance releases for both the latest trunk as well as the latest legacy branch.

Before the upcoming challenges of qooxdoo 0.8 that will, for instance, include an in-depth reimplementation of the layout engine, work has recently concentrated on resolving many open issues in the existing code base. Various parts of the framework have seen quite a large number of bugfixes, including minor and long-pending issues. In the course of bugfixing, a lot of performance improvements, especially for Internet Explorer, have been included as well. Most fixes were particularly relevant for the current trunk and led to the brand-new maintenance release 0.7.1. That part of fixes that were either 0.6.x specific or could be backported to the legacy 0.6.x branch in reasonable time, led to the other maintenance release 0.6.7. All remaining issues were reorganized in bugzilla to allow for a more efficient workflow and user contribution in the future.

Among all the additions and substantial changes two exciting new features of 0.7.1 deserve closer attention: First, building upon the new support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP) in qooxdoo, cross-browser JavaScript profiling has been made available. It can easily be switched on for a fine-grained benchmarking of any qooxdoo application, either in its development version ("source") or its deployment version ("build").

The second fundamental addition is an entire infrastructure set up to allow for an easier integration of contributions from the qooxdoo community: As an integral part of the qooxdoo project an additional repository called "qooxdoo-contrib" is now available that makes collaborative development and promotion of user contributions a lot simpler than in the past. Less restrictive SVN access, framework-independent versioning and perfect integration with the qooxdoo framework itself provide a very developer-friendly infrastructure. This concise environment is also used as an incubator for new and experimental features introduced by the qooxdoo core developers. Any feedback is appreciated to make this contribution and incubator infrastructure as attractive and as easy-to-use as possible for all members of the qooxdoo community.

Thanks again to all the users for reporting bugs, helping to resolve any pending issues, their ideas and contributions! Your help and ongoing support is really appreciated and makes developing qooxdoo a lot of fun. Enjoy!

• Release notes for 0.7.1
• Download of 0.7.1 (Latest Stable)

• Release notes for 0.6.7
• Download of 0.6.7 (Latest Legacy)

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If the previous qooxdoo releases were said to be evolutionary, the final 0.7 release certainly is revolutionary.

We are proud to present this major qooxdoo release as the result of many people's ground-breaking development work and excellent user feedback. On the one hand qooxdoo 0.7 can be seen as a logical and consistent advancement that shares most of the spirit and focus of the previous versions. On the other hand, though, many aspects of the framework have been critically re-thought, re-implemented from scratch and entirely new concepts have been introduced. Much of what was regarded state-of-the-art in previous releases has been pushed even further for an optimal combination of power, elegance and speed. Many features and concepts are now quite mature and sophisticated, so that we can say with a certain relief: "This time we did it right!".

The unparalleled feature set has been realized in a development process that spans several months and involves quite a number of developers dedicated to the project full-time or part-time. The new concepts and implementations have been put to the test in two alpha and three beta releases. Many thanks for all the great feedback and contribution from the qooxdoo community!

Some of the most significant changes and additions in qooxdoo 0.7 are the following:

• New elegant class declaration syntax
• Advanced OO features
• Java-like interfaces
• Ruby-esque mixins
• Full-blown dynamic properties, supporting init values, priorities and inheritance
• Intuitive theme support for appearances, colors, borders, fonts and icons
• Designer-friendly, cross-browser styling without CSS know-how
• Runtime switching of complete meta themes
• Extended developer tool chain (e.g. additional checks in source version, memory-leak checklist)
• Various optimizations for deployable custom applications (e.g. browser-specific variants)
• Browser history manager (cross-browser back button support; bookmarkability)
• Fast, modular API viewer that supports all the advanced OO features
• Integrated unit testing framework ("Test runner" application)
• Brand new demo browser as a replacement for the prehistoric sample section

We hope you enjoy the feature set and consistency of this major release. Of course, there is convenient built-in support available to migrate your applications to qooxdoo 0.7.

Any feedback welcome. Enjoy!

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We are proud to present 0.7-beta1 as an important milestone on the exciting way to a final qooxdoo 0.7 release.

There have been two pre-releases so far, 0.7-alpha1 and 0.7-alpha2. Each of them had introduced some thrilling new features. While alpha1 featured a concise new class declaration syntax and advanced OO concepts like interfaces and mixins, alpha2 added a challenging re-implementation of the so-called dynamic properties, which are a convenient and unique feature.

After those two alpha releases development work primarily focused on transforming all the existing dynamic properties into their more powerful cousins. This fundamental work in the framework has shown to pay off: the results are quite amazing, both in terms of performance and feature set.

With the framework being migrated to the new properties, it was a logical step to go on and get rid of all the limitations and inconsistencies in theming qooxdoo applications. Since the new dynamic properties have built-in support for advanced features like inheritance, the existing themes could be made considerably easier to read and use, even for complex user interfaces. A radical simplification of themes for colors, borders, fonts and appearance now allows for styling capabilities similar to CSS, but without having to know any CSS. For any sufficiently advanced web interface that itself is based on full-blown widgets and not just plain HTML elements, CSS simply is not an adequate solution. Especially not, if the web interface is expected to look identical in all major browsers.

To demonstrate the new theming capabilities, the existing two themes Classic and Ext have been reworked accordingly. See the showcase application for a first demo of switching between themes at runtime (still some work for IE ahead, though).

Another addition is the testrunner application, a purely client-side unit testing framework that is similar to JsUnit. It is the first self-contained incarnation of this important developer tool, and documentation on the subject of qooxdoo unit testing is still lacking. But interested developers are welcome to have a closer look and provide some feedback.

Last but not least everyone's favorite API viewer has (again) been improved considerably, e.g. now including overview pages for each namespace.

Clearly, this beta release is not meant for production use! It is expected to have some more substantial changes before a release candidate 0.7. But it would be great if users gave 0.7-beta1 a try by migrating their existing custom applications as an experiment and provide some detailed feedback. Make sure you made a copy of your application and follow the few steps for migration support. There is a target "make migration" that transforms an older 0.6.x-based application to the latest version automagically. The radical changes in theming support may require some manual work,depending on your code.

Feedback on the new features, particularly theming usage and capabilities, is highly appreciated.

Enjoy!

• Download 0.7-beta1 from SourceForge
• Testrunner
• API viewer
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As colorful and tasty as Easter eggs comes along a second pre-release 0.7-alpha2 to demonstrate many of the exciting new features to be included in 0.7.

The most significant addition after the recent alpha1 release is a complete reimplementation of qooxdoo's advanced dynamic properties. While those dynamic properties have proven to be quite powerful in previous releases, they were not as good as they could be. Many of the limitations and inconsistencies of the previous implementation have now been removed, the property declaration and their use is more elegant and user-friendly, and last but not least, they are tuned for maximum performance.

Even at this early stage there is quite some documentation for the new dynamic properties available. All interested users are welcome to get to know the proposed features. Documentation may still be a bit rough, but should explain all the new features:

• As an introduction to dynamic properties please see the article Understanding Properties.
• A textual summary of Property Features is available.
• Particularly interesting to developers and advanced users Defining Properties provides an explanation and examples for all the proposed features.
• Users familiar with the Property Support in qooxdoo 0.6.x will be shown many of its shortcomings that were the source for a reimplementation.
• For a quick overview a Comparison between old and new dynamic properties wraps up the proposed features.

The exciting new OO features that involve a concise class declaration syntax and advanced concepts like interfaces and mixins has become more mature after the alpha1 release. Those fundamental OO features along with the new dynamic properties are nicely covered by the much improved API viewer. A re-worked browser history manager now supports the browser's back and forward buttons in qooxdoo application, as can be seen in the API viewer application.

The power of the new properties will come into play while theming qooxdoo application. As in the past the styling of an application will not be done by CSS, but by cross-browser themes that are a perfect match for qooxdoo widgets. alpha2 already contains some parts of the proposed, much user-friendlier theme declaration. Sorry, no documentation for this hot new topic yet, but you are welcome to have a peek at the folder class/qx/theme/appearance/. It contains both the Classic theme and a new theme Ext, which can be selected in the showcase.

It is quite easy to take your existing applications based on qooxdoo 0.6.x and migrate them to the 0.7-alpha2 release. Make sure you made a copy of your application and follow the few steps for migration support. Starting with alpha2 migration has (again) become simpler by providing a target "make migration" that transforms an older 0.6.x-based application to the latest version automagically.

Feedback on the new features, particularly the dynamic properties, is highly appreciated.

Enjoy, and Happy Easter!

• Download 0.7-alpha2 from SourceForge
• API viewer including the new dynamic properties
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As a perfect companion to the stable and mature qooxdoo 0.6.6 released today, an early alpha release is made available to demonstrate and test the new OO features planned for 0.7.

In a previous post those exciting new OO features have been announced. Also, preliminary documentation of the new features has been given:

• As a starting point, a summary of the current class declaration is available that also shows some of its shortcomings.
• Details about the proposed class declaration for qooxdoo 0.7 are given in a separate article.
• For a quick overview a comparison of changes between 0.6.x and 0.7 wraps up the proposed features.

Well, that is all theory.

Given this full-featured alpha release, all interested users are now able to not only get a first impression, but to actually try out all the proposed new features themselves. Most of the proposed OO features are implemented and it is the perfect time to get the communities feedback.

As the ultimate real-life check it would be great if users would actually migrate their existing applications to 0.7-alpha1. Of course, this should be done strictly separated from any production environment of the existing code. Such a copy of custom application code could be upgraded for the alpha release by using the well-known migration scripts. A detailed migration tutorial to get existing applications to run under 0.7-alpha1 will follow in the next couple of days.

Any feedback is appreciated!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Unfortunately, the SDK version available at Sourceforge contains a typo. Affected is only the SDK archive. Please apply the provided patch after unpacking the SDk archive. It is not possible to replace the archives served by the SF mirrors. Sorry for any inconvenience!

• Download 0.7-alpha1 from SourceForge
• API viewer including interfaces and mixins
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