We are happy to announce a joint release of versions 1.1 and 1.0.2 of the qooxdoo framework. Downloads are available, and release notes and manuals are online. As always, many thanks to the entire community for making this happen, from the core developers, to committers and contributors, to users and enthusiasts who brought in questions and comments and suggestions.

The qooxdoo 1.1 release focuses on performance enhancements. These cover both time and space performance, and range from speedups of the build system, over partitioning of the generated code, load and start-up speed of the deployed application, to improvements of the qooxdoo run time layer in the browser. Here is a brief overview:

• Application parts can now be downloaded in parallel instead of consecutively in the running application. By leveraging parts the minimum size of a qooxdoo application is down to about 6kB gzipped (from about 30kb gzipped).
• Application shutdown and disposal has been improved (~30% speedup on shutdown).
• Support for CSS3 decorators  (40% - 50% speedup on supported browsers).
• Support for HTML5 functionality where available.
• Support for ECMAScript 5 functionality where available.
• Improved class system (~60% speedup when creating instances).
• Re-implementation of the base call optimizer.
• Improved object registry  (~33% speedup when registering objects).
• Speed ups of the build system.
• I18N information can now be loaded as locale-specific parts.

At the same time, and following our release scheme, we're releasing an 1.0.2 version, which is a regular patch release of the 1.0.x branch and contains only bug fixes. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for anybody using 1.0 or 1.0.1, and users of these versions are encouraged to upgrade.

As always, feedback on any of the releases is appreciated. Enjoy!

After the successful launch of qooxdoo 1.0 end of last year, here comes a regular update to incorporate the latest bug fixes and also a number of enhancements.

qooxdoo 1.0.1 is a patch release, meant to be backwards compatible to the previous major release qooxdoo 1.0. No migration steps should be necessary to continue to develop and build your existing apps. Please upgrade to take full advantage of this latest stable release.

From the detailed release notes, here are some of the most important fixes:

• Fixed an issue in Firefox 3.6, which was released last week (01/21/2010). The native scrollbar widgets did no longer react on clicks on the scrollbar buttons. This is a known regression in Firefox 3.6, but fortunately we could find a workaround for this issue.
• Fixed a critical issue that prevented IE to run properly under SSL. See Bug #3305 for details. It is strongly recommended to update to this release, if your application is deployed via https.
• Hiding elements, which use the AlphaImageLoader, can occasionally cause IE to completely black out the screen. We now use a technique described here to fix it.

As the latest stable version it is also perfect for new users to easily get started with qooxdoo. Download and enjoy this brand new qooxdoo release.

One of the most comprehensive JavaScript frameworks is finally available in version 1.0. qooxdoo is a mature and popular solution for creating desktop-style web applications. It has a successful track record after almost five years of development that includes a number of important milestone releases. Backed by 1&1, the world's largest web host, the professional development team and an active open source community established a framework that is feature-rich, well-tested and fast.

The brand new Showcase application provides a perfect introduction to qooxdoo 1.0 as it highlights many of its GUI features: advanced widgets like virtual tables or trees, an advanced data binding layer, full internationalization support, a brand new html editing component and custom theming:

Developers can fully concentrate on creating their apps by leveraging object-oriented JavaScript in a very elegant, yet familiar way. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is required. qooxdoo applications run in all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome) without any difficulty with cross-platform issues. To get an idea of what it's like to work with typical qooxdoo code, an interactive Playground lets you experiment with various live demos.

There is much more offered in qooxdoo, however, than just a large set of widgets, powerful layout managers and virtually unlimited theming capabilities. As a full-fledged application framework, it comes with an integrated, platform-independent tool chain that covers the entire range of app development and deployment - code validation, JS compiling and linking, compression and optimization, just to name a few. Other built-in tools allow for easy unit testing, automated GUI testing, searchable API reference, or cross-browser debugging a la Firebug. Mastering large-scale JavaScript applications is greatly facilitated by build process features such as automatically combined images ("sprites") or transparently breaking up an app into various parts that are loaded on-demand.

Feature set, design and quality of qooxdoo also make it a popular foundation for other frameworks. If you are interested in Java-based programming models that use qooxdoo internally, you may want to check out the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) or the new QxWT project, which integrates qooxdoo 1.0 with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and has been officially released today as well.

For more information about qooxdoo 1.0 please see the detailed release notes. See the online demos for qooxdoo in action. Download the qooxdoo SDK, get started and have fun creating desktop-style apps for all browsers and platforms.

Thanks to all the people involved, the core team, fellow committers and contributors, testers, users, partners and 1&1 for their fantastic job and great support!

Today qooxdoo 1.0-beta1 was released as planned. Please download this beta release as a regular SDK and give it a spin.

As with any beta release there are some known issues that we like to address in the next few days, and postpone the ones that are either regarded insignificant or too intricate for the 1.0 time frame. It would be great if you could report all issues you find while working with this preview release.

Documentation for qooxdoo 1.0 is also in the works in a separate wiki space, and should become more consistent and accurate day-by-day. As brought forward in a previous blog post, we'd really appreciate if some of you could help with correcting and polishing the docs (may it just be typos or language issues).

For detailed info about the specific changes in qooxdoo 1.0-beta1 checkout the release notes.

With your help and support we'll continue to work on the 1.0 release, planned to ship right before Xmas.

Download for a test drive!

As planned the Open Source RIA Framework qooxdoo is available in a new release 0.8.3. It is quite a comprehensive release, with many improvements and bugfixes over the previous version. For more info please see the detailed release notes.

Some highlights of this release include:

• New Form Handling
• Unified Selection API
• Advanced Data Binding
• New FlowLayout
• New FlashWidget
• New ThemedIframe
• Global Error Handling
• and more ...

The following screenshot shows some features of the new form handling:

qooxdoo 0.8.3 is one of the best tested and most extensive releases to date. To get an idea, see some indicators for the development and testing that went into this release:

• about 1.700 Commits since last release
• about 300 Bug fixes
• more than 1.100 Unit tests (incl. more than 3.200 assertions)
• about 30 Browsers/OS combinations continuously unit-/GUI-tested
• about 160 GUI-tests of applications, fully automated

It is recommended that users upgrade their existing applications to this latest stable version. Migration should be straightforward (but you should carefully read the migration info in the release notes). As the latest stable version it is also perfect for new users to easily get started with qooxdoo. Download and enjoy the brand new 0.8.3 release.

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

What's better than one release? Yepp, getting two release out of the door

This way we want to offer a stable release for both qooxdoo codebases.
Version 0.3 is based on the current 0.8.2 release and version 0.4 is targeted for the legacy release 0.7.4.
Both versions are mainly bugfixing releases with the aim to stabilize the component.

After the release the code base of the 0.3 version will replace the current trunk (0.4 based) to continue the development on a 0.8 base.

Special thanks to Petr Kobalicek for contributing code and helping with the migration to 0.8 and to John Spackman for hunting some bugs and starting to work on the HtmlEditor contribution.

Interesting links:

• 0.3 Demo
• 0.4 Demo
• Online Overview
• Project documentation
• Download at SF

Give it a try and let us know if you like.

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!

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!

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!