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.

Inspector debugging tool

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! :-)