Still holiday season around here: team members returning to work (me this week, Thomas next week, Fabian the week after), or about to go on vacation (Jonny, Alex). Among all the temporary coming and going, there is also a highlight:

New core developer

Christian Schmidt joined the qooxdoo team this week as a new full-time employee at 1&1. During his recent diploma thesis he already worked with qooxdoo and Eclipse RAP, so now he started to dig into all the new features of 0.8. Sure he'll say hello to everybody soon. Again, welcome Chris, glad to have you here.

Framework

Work continued on stabilizing and improving the framework. Some of last week's issues include:

* Bugfix for #1407: IE6 freezes due to missing "blank.gif" placeholders.
A missing "#asset" directive caused the "blank.gif" image to be requested with the wrong URL. As this image is used at every so-called "protector" DOM element (an element which is used along with the decorator implementations), the browser unsuccessfully requested this image multiple times. This caused problems - especially IE6 could freeze up. This issue is now fixed in trunk.

* Bugfix for #1132: Inline window stops dragging when it gets moved too quickly. Using window widgets inside an inline application now works as expected.

* Bug #1415: Standalone demos currently don't work for IE in trunk, i.e. demos that are opened outside the demobrowser. This bug has to be fixed in future versions, just want to you let know about when you are developing in SVN trunk. Stay tuned for a bugfix

* Added check for all non-static classes. In order to catch mistakes during development more easily, an "exend" key is now required for all non-static classes, otherwise an error is displayed.

JavaScript browser war

Sure you noticed, at least after Mozilla announced TraceMonkey, then Google Chrome entered the browser market, and now Webkit's new JS engine SquirrelFish Extreme arrived. Those are truly exciting times for web development - and especially qooxdoo. With its determination to leverage JavaScript for creating web applications these announcements feel like some paradigm shift that we hoped for - and envisioned - for quite a long time. But that there are so many browsers now, that rival each other for the JavaScript performance crown, is fabulous. At least three browsers come with sophisticated JS engines that are up for the challenge to bring JavaScript execution speed into absolutely amazing regions: Webkit SquirrelFish Extreme, Firefox Tracemonkey and Google Chrome V8.

You shouldn't just sit back and enjoy this competition of JavaScript engines from a distance. Get ready with your qooxdoo rich internet application. There has never been a better time for creating qooxdoo-based RIAs!