Greetings, qooxdooers, for another weekly wrap-up of the state of affairs in qooxdoo!

General

qooxdoo 0.8-alpha2 has been released just a week ago, thanks for all of your feedback. In the following days, major parts of the Sourceforge.net service platform (which also hosts qooxdoo) were moved both physically (from California to Illinois), as well as concerning software versions. We don't know about you, but we felt major impacts of this migration, even after its official completion. Among other things the statistics features of Sourceforge will remain dormant until next month, so we don't even have download figures for our latest release .

But "after release is before release", and we are already in full gear for qooxdoo 0.8-beta1, planning its scope and dispatching tasks. More details will be available soon at this space.

With keen interest we followed the recent release of Jython 2.5a1, a Python implementation in Java. As our tool chain is increasingly built on Python this is an interesting extension of available runtime environments for this code, and will most likely be warmly welcomed by developers at home in a pure Java environment. Initial tests with our generator done by Fabian were indeed promising, and we are looking forward to full support of our build tools by Jython.

Applications

The initial phase of basing our build chain on the new generator is drawing to an end. Nearly all targets available under the make-based system are now available with the new generator as well, the notable exceptions being 'make test' and 'make buildtool' which will be supplied later. Invocations of the 'make' command are now just a wafer-thin wrapper around the generator invocations which becomes apparent with some of our standard applications like the Feedreader. The Apiviewer is self-hosting again, i.e. you can generate the API documentation of the Apiviewer itself.

The documentation of generator configuration got much love from Thomas, and is now split into a main page, a page with in-depth articles about important concepts, and a reference listing of the configuration keys.

And finally, the Showcase application which showed its age has been removed, at least for the time being until it can be re-surrected with new shine and glory .

Framework

A first basic implementation of a low level text selection API has been added. Currently this API allows to get the current selection as string and the current selection length as well as to set a selection on elements, text nodes and of course form elements (input and textarea). This API is available for all four major browsers Gecko, IE, Webkit and Opera.

Without further a-do, here is what else happened in the framework:

• Most bugs reported for alpha2 were fixed - thanks to all the submitters.
  • A listener was added for draggesture events, to block gecko's native drag and drop when resizing/dragging qooxdoo widgets around.
  • Window resizes now keep the correct cursor.
  • Support was added to minimize/maximize windows.
  • Flickering on initial click on a widget has been removed.
• Support for line height property in fonts has been added.
• More Window refactoring:
  • support for modal windows
  • extracted MMovable mixin
  • refactored MResizeable
  • added possibility to block interaction with the window contents; needed for advanced modality support
• Port of Menu has been started
• Port of the Table has been started
• TabView has been polished
• Work has been done on a modern TabView appearance

Community

This week another qooxdoo real-life example surfaced. Zed Builds & Bugs Management is an application targeted at software development teams and combines the following components:

1. Automated Software Build Management
2. Task, Bug, Feature, Assignment, etc. Management
3. Discussion Forums for team dialogs
4. Wiki for documentation, team group design, document storage, personal pages, etc.
5. General server administration

The power of the application is in it’s pure web (qooxdoo!) interface, and the database which is shared among all facets of the application. Meaning your Wiki pages can query the task database, and your automated builds can update tasks as well.

If you created a qooxdoo application (or any software that leverages qooxdoo), please let people know about it. It is an excellent way to give back to this open source project. Just go to the real-life examples and add a section for your app, maybe including a screenshot, and add a link to an online demo if available. Thanks!