Greetings, qooxdoodians! Still breathless from yesterday's 0.8 release (and
maybe with a little hang-over here and there), we nevertheless stick
unwaveringly to our weekly report tradition. So read on!

Release qooxdoo 0.8

Yesterday saw the landing of version 0.8 of qooxdoo. This child of love and labor, with roughly 13 months of incubation and several thousands of SVN commits that went into it, was friendly received so far and we hope for further reception. So spread the word!

Memory Leaks

We have made major improvements to the internal object registration mechanism in 0.8. Many ideas came from Stefan Hansel. Thanks again to him for the many hours spent to identify and work around these issues. qooxdoo 0.8 is now without memory leaks - even in IE - which means that it is now even more practical to be used for enterprise application development. Details on the improvements will be posted next week. Stay tuned.

PNG's vs. IE7

During the very last days of 0.8 development some users started sending us screenshots and reports about bad rendering results of our Modern theme in Internet Explorer 7. This seems to only affect a small group of users, but for them it is not possible to combine stretched PNG images e.g. a image tag with increased dimensions with a opacity filter. There were many artifacts in the resulting application. The workaround now implemented in 0.8 is to use the AlphaImageLoader filter in IE7 as well. Normally it is common belief that IE7 supports all kind of PNG images natively, but it seems that in combination with other filters it might still be the better choice to use the AlphaImageLoader explicitly. Many thanks for the time spent by Maria Siebert. She helped us a lot with identifying the issue and applying a final fix (right before release).

Twitter

We started a qooxdoo twitter stream this week. Hopes are that this will give a more "real-time" insight into our project whereabouts for those of you who care, especially in times of higher attention like around releases. There is also a new friendfeed that combines this twitter stream with the news feed from this blog.

Vacation

None of the qooxdoo core developers here at 1&1 was preferring a summer vacation over finishing work on qooxdoo 0.8. Well, at least it looks like it, given the vacation schedule: in September, all of us will be gone. Of course, at different times and with a decent overlap. Anyway, mailing list support should be fine at all times in September, but please be patient if not all of your request can be answered right away. September isn't only about absence: we are looking forward to a new colleague, starting here as a full-time qooxdoo developer on Sept 15, 2008. That's actually the day I'll be back from my vacation, which starts now

Again, thanks for all your support. Take qooxdoo 0.8 for a test drive. Enjoy.