Recent Presentation

Thanks again to Tobi Oetiker for presenting qooxdoo training at the Large Installation System Administration Conference LISA '08. According to attendees it was a fine introduction on how to create RIA applications with qooxdoo. Tobi put his great material online that you shouldn't miss!

What's your next tech event?

If you plan on attending a conference, a code camp, basically any kind of tech event you think qooxdoo should be presented at, why don't you take the chance and become a speaker and let people know about it? Just drop us a note, we'll support and help you as much as we can (material, slides, give-aways, etc.).

Eclipse Summit Europe

Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 is the premier European event for users, contributors, adopters, add-in providers and service providers to learn, share expertise and discover new opportunities and solutions in the Eclipse ecosystem. It takes place on November 19-20 in Ludwigsburg/Germany. We are going to participate (make sure to stop by the United Internet booth to meet Fabian and me for some qooxdoo chat and job opportunities). We are looking forward to all the exciting technical discussions and to meeting people (again).

Generator

The following features have been added to the configuration system of the generator:

• Name resolution for imported jobs is now extended to include the local (i.e. the importing) config, and then the original config. This way job references in imported jobs that cannot be resolved in the current config will be resolved in the original config (i.e. the config the imported job was defined in).
• You can now use macros from the config's top-level let in other top-level keys, like include or export. This fixes a common inconvenience to e.g. specify a path to the qooxdoo installation as a macro, but not being able to reference it when including application.json.
• In the import subkey of a top-level include you can now use little maps in place of a plain job name. The format of the maps is {"name": <jobname>, "as": <alias>}, so you can import the named job under a different name. This is helpful to circumvent name clashes with local jobs.
• To enforce overriding behaviour of a job or job feature during job extension, you now have to use "=" as a prefix for the job or feature name. The "__overriding__" map key to achieve the same result is no longer supported.
• The export key for filtering jobs exported during config includes has been deprecated for the time being, due to potential interference with job name resolution. This affects all config files that are being included by others, but is safe to use for application-level configs that are user-facing and are not further included (In these cases, it is helpful to limit the user-visible list of jobs). - This might get revoked in the future.

Also, work on a schema definition for configuration files has started.

IE8 Support

Some info about the current state of IE8 support: This week Chris spent some time to test Internet Explorer 8 support in qooxdoo. We tested qooxdoo 0.8 (trunk) and 0.7.x with IE8 Beta2 (the latest pre-release) in all three modes (Quirks, IE7 standard and IE8 standard).

Good news is, qooxdoo (0.8 als well as 0.7.x) supports both Quirks and IE7 standard mode. Your qooxdoo application should run fine in any of these two modes. See the wiki page about IE8 modes and how you can select one for your application.

The not so good news is, that we don't (at the moment) support IE8 standard mode, due to some strange rendering problems that we think are present in this second beta of IE8. We might continue to try to figure out a solution, but at the moment it seems we need to wait for another (pre-)release of IE8 that has less problems. Currently we suggest to run IE7 standard mode to get the best result for your qooxdoo application.

Bug fixing

As announced in the previous blog post, we started to include info about the issues that have been fixed during the week. If you have comments and suggestions about the presentation of bug information, please let us know. Ok, so here are the bugs fixed since last week:

UI Core

• #1564 It is not possible to create an element and apply styles at the same time
• #1452 Tab key to navigate between widgets doesn't always work inside a TabView
• #1512 Command doesn't stop the default action in the browser when using browser shot cuts.
• #1576 The shortcut parsing is incorrect.
• #1480 Zooming in or out distorts text on widgets in IE7
• #1523 terminate() and close() methods are not called
• #1530 Property "selectable" for qx.ui.basic.Label doesn't work in all browsers
• #1376 Chrome problem with document.getElementsByTagName
• #1556 Flash detection doesn't work in bom.
• #1566 Couldn't change the color by setting hex value.
• #1572 External API from Flash is not available in IE8.

Window

• #1465 blockerColor and blockerOpacity don't work
• #1532 maximized windows cant be unmaximized!
• #1575 Negative coordinates i window.center()

Table

• #1560 Filtered Table Model does not Restore values more than once.

Menu

• #1561 qx.ui.menu.CheckBox doesn't fire changeChecked event

Framework

• #1577 qx.bom.client.Multimedia: "has" method needs implementation
• #818 qx.client.Timer misbehaves in Firefox

Demobrowser

• #1551 Clip (BOM): Script error "Invalid argument" when clicking "ResetClip"
• #1552 Label (BOM): Ellipsis doesn't work with long label
• #1553 Request (BOM): Script error "Object doesn't support this property or method"
• #1554 Selection (BOM): The "result div" is show without border and correct size.
• #1555 Event Iframe (Event): Demo has a script error in build.
• #1544 Translation Color (Animation): The demo doesn't show the "Welcome to qooxdoo animation!" element.
• #1545 Translation Position (Animation): The demo doesn't show the "Welcome to qooxdoo animation!" element.
• #1546 Tree Highlight (Animation): Script error when do some action with nodes.
• #1557 Save Dialog (Animation): Can't read the dialog text , when the dialog is opened a second time.
• #1562 Calculator shows -8 after click on 1, +/-, 2

Testrunner

• #842 Can't select test result output of TestRunner in IE

Tooling

• #1252 Add support for macro expansions in "include" section in config.json

That's it for now. Have a nice weekend.