A rather short weekly status report this time, as much work has gone into yesterday's

First Release Candidate

qooxdoo 0.8-rc1 is available and ready for a test ride. Please read the announcement, that asks for your help in identifying and reporting any open issues. Thanks for your support!

Contributions

qooxdoo-contrib is the project's infrastructure for contributions to the framework. It allows for an successful collaboration on new features and works as an incubator for features that are still experimental. As with other parts of the framework, it is constantly improving, and with the number of contributions. The build process in 0.8 (as in 0.7) allows for transparently integrating contributions. Once there are contributions available or about to become available for 0.8 this will certainly be further polished and extended. Besides the rather technical details of seemless and user-friendly integration, the overall visibility of contributions is also being addressed during an ongoing improvement, e.g. providing individual downloads or hosted online demos.

Memory Leaks

Thanks to the thorough and repeated testing of Stefan Hansel, memory consumption became one of the hot spots of 0.8 framework development last week. During the course of careful analysis and systematic retrofitting of the existing memory management facilities, memory consumption could be significantly reduced, particularly in IE. A few bugs responsible for or related to memory leaks could also be identified and resolved. In legacy 0.7 some issues seem to remain, somewhat different to 0.8, that may have more of an practical impact than expected, but this requires more analysis.

Outlook

Plans continue to have a qooxdoo 0.8 final release available next week. Keep your fingers crossed.