The week in qooxdoo (2008-04-18)
Filed under: Activity Reports
By Fabian Jakobs @ April 18, 2008 11:20 am
Children Handling
Children handling in the qooxdoo 0.8 development branch has been completely refactored. After some discussion on the mailing list we decided to move the widget children handling from the layout managers back into the widgets. Initially we have adopted the "Qt approach": Each widget with child widgets needs a layout manager to maintain the child list and to position the children. Children were added only to the layout manager. This has been changed back to the more "traditional" approach, where the children list is maintained by the parent widget. A layout manager can optionally be used to position the parent's children. The main reason for this change is that it makes it easier for people to build up the widget hierarchy in a generic way without knowing the layout managers used. Such an approach is needed e.g. by the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP), or other frameworks on-top of qooxdoo like qxTransformer, and also by GUI builders, etc.
Generator2
Some new features have been added to the new generator2:
- Support for image slicing and combining in generator (triggers 'slice-images' and 'combine-images' [*]); "*-combined.png" images and their corresponding ".meta" files are showing up in SVN. The functionality is based on tools from ImageMagick. Combined images are used within qooxdoo for e.g. decorators.
- New #asset() compiler hints can now include macro references which are defined in the config.json file; this can be used to e.g. vary over themes [*].
General
Some user-supplied patches went into the qooxdoo user extension for Selenium.
Comment by Sebastian Werner
I’ve just updated the development snapshot of the API-Viewer to show the latest changes. Please have a look at the “ui” section for an intial impression of the new API.
April 18, 2008 6:12 pm
Comment by Jochen Krause
That is great news! The rap team will provide feedback next week.
There is another topic that I would like to bring up. We are thinking about implementing a lightweight widget representation using the new BOM layer only (ideally plus Animation). This implementation would mainly target mobile phone browsers (and will be done by another team in Sofia). But right now even the simplest demos like http://demo.qooxdoo.org/devel/demobrowser/demo/bom/AttributeStyle_1.html do not run on an IPhone. Is there something that we could do to help, or are mobile browsers out of scope even for BOM?
Cheers Jochen
April 19, 2008 5:02 pm
Comment by Sebastian Werner
Jochen: BOM (Browser Object Model => qooxdoo’s new low level layer) should work more or less out of the box. The question is what exactly goes wrong there. The downloaded JS is quite small in this case. There are some limitations the iPhone has, which are not found in the normal Webkit/Safari e.g. runtime limits, memory limits etc. To fix this we need someone who would like to debug this. I don’t think we have resources for this during the 0.8 release cycle. But maybe it is something we can have a look afterwards.
April 20, 2008 3:30 pm
Comment by Andreas Ecker
Hi Jochen, it would be great if someone could have a closer look and try to run qooxdoo applications on the iPhone. There seem to be some strange problems with the current iPhone software/Safari, as Fabian noticed just the other day. This would need further debugging, and maybe the issues are (partly) gone with the upcoming iPhone software update? Anyway, I also would like that topic to get more attention and I’m sure some people in the qooxdoo community will be interested to help. Lets move this discussion over to the mailing list, add more info into the wiki and start a qooxdoo-contrib project soon. What do you think?
April 23, 2008 4:52 pm