The week in qooxdoo (2009-04-30)
Filed under: Activity Reports
By Thomas Herchenröder @ April 30, 2009 16:47
Due to a public holiday in Germany tomorrow, here is another early issue of our weekly activity report. Fasten seat belts!
Framework
Form API
Hopefully everyone checked out the new buddy property on the label. The form showcase in the demobrowser has been updated and now uses the buddy property. Just click on a label and check the focus.
The implementation of the new API has also started. All interfaces have been added to the framework and have been implemented for the first two widgets, the Spinner and the Slider. For that, a lot of changes have been made in the appearance to visualize the invalid state of the widgets. But not only the appearance has been changed. Also some implementation details of the decorators were adressed.
You can see the changes yourself in the FormValidation demo.
Selection API
As promised in the last weekly blog post, we have finished the implementations for the new selection API. Also we have written a wiki article about the new selection API and how to migrate to it. Let us take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody for contributing.
Unknown Image Warning
This warning is now only shown when you are loading any image which is not under the control of the ResourceManager or is not referenced with a HTTP/HTTPS URI. Since loading external images via HTTP/HTTPS is a common usecase we decided to remove the warning for these cases.
Bug fixes
The TextArea now fires input events again (#2304). For a complete list of bugs fixed during the last working week, use this bugzilla query.
Generator
Documentation
There are two new sections in the tool part of our snippets page, one about setting a different class as main application class, the other about integrating non-qooxdoo JS code into an application.
Dependency Tracking
More work has been done in the dependency area. We introduced an alternative sort algorithm based on the excellent Python graph module. A new experimental configuration sub-key "sort-topological" of the dependencies key can be used to activate that. Again, this is not production-ready. To support working on the class dependencies of framework classes, enhanced reporting on the generator side will be available shortly. There will even be graphical output to that end 
.
Community
Layout Tutorial
Another part of the layout tutorial provided by qooxdoo community member Atamert Ölçgen is online:
Using Layouts In Qooxdoo - Part 5: Basic & Canvas
That's it for now - be in touch next time.
Comment by Sebastian Werner
Nice work on the “buddy” property. I’m not sure though whether the support is already complete, because when compared to the HTML “for” element there are some things which are not yet working:
- Clicking on a label for a text field (or the like) should select all content of the field so that the user can easily replace the content.
- Clicking on a label for a checkbox should toggle the “checked” status of the Checkbox.
- Clicking on a label for a radio button should select the radio button (no toggling here)
Not sure if this makes sense for the buddy property as well, but I don’t think it might be that wrong here as well.
Regarding the form error handling it might also be a good idea to make these “tips” closable and show them directly without any user action. Currently they are directly hidden when clicking somewhere.
What’s about to have a slight red gradient in the form fields? In focus states the backlight is light blue. In error cases it might be cool to make it light red?
I am not sure if the “snake” background image is a good idea as it is more often seen in conjunction with wrong written words, but not with form errors. It might also lead to conflicts with native support for spell checking.
April 30, 2009 17:07