Where's the beef? qooxdoo ain't no fluffy bun:

Alpha release

Work currently concentrates on getting the code base in trunk ready for the upcoming release qooxdoo 0.8-alpha1. It is planned to have it out the door by May 20, since there's another holiday here on May 22 including a long weekend. This alpha release is not feature complete yet, of course, but should already provide quite a stable base for the workshops at the upcoming ...

Conferences

Preparations for the upcoming conferences are in full gear. Have you checked out the qooxdoo talks and workshops at the upcoming conferences? It's a great opportunity to meet most of the core developers. Let us know about your plans, so that we arrange for some decently hot weather and cold drinks.

Feedreader

The feedreader was ported to the upcoming qooxdoo 0.8-alpha1. It also has got a whole lotta love to make it ready for the workshops on May 26th. We have cleaned up the whole beast, added data models, improved the GUI. The feedreader is the first application which uses the new 0.8 API. There were also some additions to the new Modern theme to support the previously incomplete appearance (not quite finished yet).

Skeleton & Quickstart

Both mini applications - being blue prints for your first qooxdoo applications - have been updated to the 0.8 API. They automatically make use of the new generator and already use the new widgets - basically just the button widget, as before ;) .

Layout Improvements

Some quirks in the layout system were resolved. In particular the scrollbars got another set of fixes applied and their API was improved. Canvas layout now supports a new layout property called "edge" to easily allow to stretch a widget to all the edges (convenient for cases of top, right, bottom, left having the same value).

Resizer & Window

The window and resizer widgets were ported to 0.8. It looks quite good so far, but there are still some things open. This means that neither the API is final yet, nor is the appearance. Sub control handling for complex widgets like window is also still missing.

Splitpane widget in the works

Jonathan is currently starting with a port of the SplitPane widget. After his excellent work on the HtmlArea this actually is the first widget he ports to the 0.8 infrastructure. Be the source with you, Johnny!

Generator

This week's efforts mainly went into internal representation of global structures of the compiled application (like qxresources, etc.). Also, initial support for "contrib://"-style Manifests has been added to the "library" config key, but will see further refinement. This allows you to use qooxdoo-contrib projects in your own projects, as you already know it from qooxdoo 0.7. Preliminary documentation of the generator is available.

Now to some exciting topics outside the qooxdoo 0.8 development:

Visual GUI Builder for qxTransformer

PyQooxCard is a visual GUI builder based on the layoutEditor of the original PythonCard package. It has been extended by John Henry to support qxtransformer code generation. PyQooxCard allows you to create similar-looking GUIs for the desktop and the web - you can use the same resource files to create python executables and qxml templates. This sub project is still under heavy development, feedback is welcome.

Appearance is Everything

Great news, at long last an early adopter's release of AIE themes for qooxdoo 0.7.3 is available for download. A two page Quick Start Guide is included to help get you started. Check out the demos and please provide some feedback.

Have a nice weekend. :-)