Welcome to another round-up of events in and around qooxdoo!

JSConfEU - "That was Rock'n'Roll!"

With a lot of excitement Fabian, Johnny, Martin and Alex from the core team returned from this year's JSConf Europe, held in Berlin on the past weekend. If any of you followed the conference, either directly or remotely, you will have noticed the amount of positive reactions it received. It was probably the best Ajax/JavaScript related conference anyone of us had attended so far. With speakers like Dion Almaer, Douglas Crockford, John Resig or Thomas Fuchs the lineup was excellent. Being a rather small and focused conference really helped to improve the overall quality. Everyone there seemed to be working on some state-of-the-art JavaScript project. A particularly hot topic was server-side (or should I say: beyond-the-browser) Javascript, with presentations about CommonJS, Narwhal and node.JS. This really seems to get into shape.

On the second day Fabian gave a talk about the internals of the qooxdoo widget system. The talk was well received and it was fun to discuss the design decisions with authors of other JavaScript frameworks. All of us really enjoyed being there and we are already looking forward to the next JSConf.

Framework

Improvements on Blocker

We finished some improvements on our current implementation on Blocker. The methods for blocking and unblocking take care now of the number of method calls. This means if the block method is called twice, the blocker is removed when the unblock method is also called twice.  To force a removal two new methods are added, one for the blocker (forceUnblock) and one for the content blocker (forceUnblockContent), both methods remove the blocker directly.

Bugs

A lot of focus this past week went into fixing bugs and analysing performance. For a complete list of bugs fixed, use this bugzilla query.

Community

Two events hit qooxdoo-contrib this week. Burak Arslan issued a maintenance release of his JsQt. He writes:

"A maintenance release for JsQt is now up. I've also extracted properties
from Qt headers and put a compatibility table up. I hope it'll help
users better understand the capabilities of JsQt. I wonder how useful
they will be -- comments are welcome."

And sedulous Christian Boulanger has added the Dialog widget set. From the README:

"The Dialog project provides many often-used widgets required in user
interaction, such as alert, confirm, prompt, and others that simplify
the web developer's daily work."

It's at an early stage, and Christian welcomes  active collaboration.

That's it for this week - see you around next time!