Another weekly status report. It's for last week, sorry for the delay, we were mostly busy in preparing for a 0.8.1 release. Thanks to Thomas for his details about SourceForge and Generator:

SourceForge

We have revamped the download area of our project platform on SourceForge. qooxdoo releases are now organized into three categories, or packages as SourceForge calls them, qooxdoo-current, qooxdoo-legacy and qooxdoo-test.

qooxdoo-test contains all pre-releases like betas or release candidates. qooxdoo-legacy holds all stable releases up to, but excluding, the current line of qooxdoo releases; this currently includes all releases up to 0.7.4. qooxdoo-current holds the 0.8 release as the most recent and stable version.

The aim is to make the latest qooxdoo version more prominent, even though a legacy release might be more recent (like it was the case with 0.7.4). Unfortunately, SourceForge always highlights the most recent release, so don't be confused if you are offered a 0.7.4 download when you enter qooxdoo' SourceForge project page. qooxdoo 0.8 is still the most advanced release.

Generator

More URI Handling

After the re-work on URI handling recently, those changes are slowly showing up in the framework apps themselves. Since framework apps usually don't need dedicated "uri" settings in their library references, they have been removed. This includes the popular setting fed by the QOOXDOO_URI macro, which has been removed along the way (well, if you don't have a specific setting, you don't need a macro to fill it, right?!). If you need to override this for libraries that come in by using external configs, you can just do so by specifying the particular library in your local config and add a "uri" parameter to it. See here for more details (look for the section Overriding 'uri' settings of a library).

As a consequence, the also popular APPLICATION_URI macro is gone. With the current implementation of giving precedence to library 'uri' settings over compile-* settings, we couldn't keep the 'uri' slot in libraries just to provide a place to slip the macro in. As said above, the new handling is to add a library key for the application in the local config, where you can specify the application's URI (bug#1646).

QOOXDOO_PATH Macro

The QOOXDOO_PATH macro in config files is now used more consistently, e.g. when including other config files from the qooxdoo installation. Its value is now therefore the main qooxdoo (SDK) install directory, not the framework subdirectory. Please adjust your configs accordingly. The skeleton's generate.py will also look into the config.json to fetch the value of QOOXDOO_PATH for its own workings, so you can switch environments with a single change (but beware that the scanning is naive and e.g. doesn't account for comments; it just takes the first occurrence of the macro; bug#1456).

"themes" Config Key

The "themes" config key has been renamed to "asset-let", to better reflect its purpose. Though it is mainly used to inject theme-relevant information into the #asset hints, it's a general-purpose macro facility for those hints. The new name reflects that and avoids unnecessary confusion.

Solved issues

Some of the fixes and improvements include:

  • Key press events are now working again properly when qx.event.Command is used. See Bug #1700 for more details
  • Many issues concerning qooxdoo WYSIWYG editor HtmlArea were solved. A more detailed blog post about the recent improvements and the state of the widget is planned.

Blogosphere

Recently one could notice quite some increased activity in the "blogosphere" regarding qooxdoo. Frequently existing as well as new users mention qooxdoo as their framework of choice, or at least as one that is part of their current framework evaluations. That is great, more developers seem to appreciate the powerful, if not unique, features of qooxdoo for creating rich internet applications.

But there are still too many people that don't know (enough) about qooxdoo, and it would be great if the existing community could help in letting those potential users know. So, if you happen to run your own blog, or you're part of some technically related community, or you notice a discussion somewhere on the net that could really benefit from bringing up qooxdoo, please take the chance to talk about it. Of course, try to add real value to a discussion, and not to bother people that aren't interested. Keep passing the open windows...

A professional and independent review of qooxdoo has been the recent article at Webreference about Popular JavaScript Framework Libraries. Covering a number of frameworks in this series of articles, Rob Gravelle does a great and accurate job as an author in highlighting many qooxdoo specific strengths.

In his private blog, Kenny Tilton is less neutral about other frameworks, when talking about his experience as a new user of qooxdoo. While he has a strong Lisp background, The Road to qooxdoo might also be an interesting read for any developer independent of his/her programming CV.

Release 0.8.1

Ok, that's it for reporting some of the things that happened last week. Stay tuned for the release of qooxdoo 0.8.1. Oh wait, who's knocking? ;-)