Last month's release qooxdoo 0.7 was regarded a "quantum leap" that introduced many advanced features into the framework. It has been well-received and users seem to enjoy it as a mature platform for their custom application development. Now qooxdoo has been made even more stable by two maintenance releases for both the latest trunk as well as the latest legacy branch.

Before the upcoming challenges of qooxdoo 0.8 that will, for instance, include an in-depth reimplementation of the layout engine, work has recently concentrated on resolving many open issues in the existing code base. Various parts of the framework have seen quite a large number of bugfixes, including minor and long-pending issues. In the course of bugfixing, a lot of performance improvements, especially for Internet Explorer, have been included as well. Most fixes were particularly relevant for the current trunk and led to the brand-new maintenance release 0.7.1. That part of fixes that were either 0.6.x specific or could be backported to the legacy 0.6.x branch in reasonable time, led to the other maintenance release 0.6.7. All remaining issues were reorganized in bugzilla to allow for a more efficient workflow and user contribution in the future.

Among all the additions and substantial changes two exciting new features of 0.7.1 deserve closer attention: First, building upon the new support for aspect-oriented programming (AOP) in qooxdoo, cross-browser JavaScript profiling has been made available. It can easily be switched on for a fine-grained benchmarking of any qooxdoo application, either in its development version ("source") or its deployment version ("build").

The second fundamental addition is an entire infrastructure set up to allow for an easier integration of contributions from the qooxdoo community: As an integral part of the qooxdoo project an additional repository called "qooxdoo-contrib" is now available that makes collaborative development and promotion of user contributions a lot simpler than in the past. Less restrictive SVN access, framework-independent versioning and perfect integration with the qooxdoo framework itself provide a very developer-friendly infrastructure. This concise environment is also used as an incubator for new and experimental features introduced by the qooxdoo core developers. Any feedback is appreciated to make this contribution and incubator infrastructure as attractive and as easy-to-use as possible for all members of the qooxdoo community.

Thanks again to all the users for reporting bugs, helping to resolve any pending issues, their ideas and contributions! Your help and ongoing support is really appreciated and makes developing qooxdoo a lot of fun. Enjoy!