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!