sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with qooxdoo + reports

Here's the weekly status update. It arrives a bit late, as there was a National holiday on 3rd of October, so the qooxdoo core team at 1&1 enjoyed a long weekend.

Last week we had the pleasure to welcome Yücel Beser, who joins the team for a Bachelor thesis on qooxdoo, and Martin Wittemann, who's back full-time for his Master thesis on qooxdoo data binding. Fabian also returned from vacation, so work continues with bugfixing and advancing the core framework. Some fundamental internals are to be addressed, e.g. memory leaks in 0.7 or script loading in 0.8. Watch out for some more details about topics and agenda.

Spket IDE

A great announcement was the integrated qooxdoo support in the new release of Spket IDE. It can either be used as a stand-alone application or as a plugin to Eclipse IDE. It features code assist for qooxdoo 0.8, supporting API reference documentation. Pretty handy is the "open declaration" feature, that allows to jump to the corresponding source code of a function or constructor. See the Spket IDE qooxdoo features for more details. As Eric Suen noted, support for custom classes will be added in a future version. Keep up the good work!

Textmate

Another topic came up on the mailing list for better qooxdoo tool support: Mike was asking for a collaboration on a qooxdoo Textmate bundle. As there are some interested Textmate users in qooxdoo land, such a support might become a nice addition to qooxdoo-contrib. If you are a Textmate/qooxdoo user, you're welcome to help in creating and refining such a bundle.

Next week

We are looking forward to Alex and Johnny to return from vacation next week, so the qooxdoo core team is pretty much complete again and ready for the next tasks and challenges, and, of course, new releases.

Another weekly status report. Another brief one. Most team members will return shortly return from vacation, so there'll be much more to cover on a weekly basis. Nonetheless, some team members are up for a challenging:

Winter of Code

Well, sort of. Apologies to Google. Anyway, two students will join the qooxdoo core team at 1&1 in October. One of them, Martin Wittemann has been a long-time contributor and team member, and will certainly have fun with his Master thesis on an interesting and overdue topic: databinding in qooxdoo. The other student, Yücel Beser, is new to qooxdoo, but nonetheless his Bachelor thesis will surely improve the way we all create and maintain qooxdoo applications. We're looking forward to working with you guys!

Ok, let's keep the status report really short this time. Next week we'll pull together more information: new contributions, roadmap updates, bugfixes and so on. C U.

Still holiday season around here: team members returning to work (me this week, Thomas next week, Fabian the week after), or about to go on vacation (Jonny, Alex). Among all the temporary coming and going, there is also a highlight:

New core developer

Christian Schmidt joined the qooxdoo team this week as a new full-time employee at 1&1. During his recent diploma thesis he already worked with qooxdoo and Eclipse RAP, so now he started to dig into all the new features of 0.8. Sure he'll say hello to everybody soon. Again, welcome Chris, glad to have you here.

Framework

Work continued on stabilizing and improving the framework. Some of last week's issues include:

* Bugfix for #1407: IE6 freezes due to missing "blank.gif" placeholders.
A missing "#asset" directive caused the "blank.gif" image to be requested with the wrong URL. As this image is used at every so-called "protector" DOM element (an element which is used along with the decorator implementations), the browser unsuccessfully requested this image multiple times. This caused problems - especially IE6 could freeze up. This issue is now fixed in trunk.

* Bugfix for #1132: Inline window stops dragging when it gets moved too quickly. Using window widgets inside an inline application now works as expected.

* Bug #1415: Standalone demos currently don't work for IE in trunk, i.e. demos that are opened outside the demobrowser. This bug has to be fixed in future versions, just want to you let know about when you are developing in SVN trunk. Stay tuned for a bugfix

* Added check for all non-static classes. In order to catch mistakes during development more easily, an "exend" key is now required for all non-static classes, otherwise an error is displayed.

JavaScript browser war

Sure you noticed, at least after Mozilla announced TraceMonkey, then Google Chrome entered the browser market, and now Webkit's new JS engine SquirrelFish Extreme arrived. Those are truly exciting times for web development - and especially qooxdoo. With its determination to leverage JavaScript for creating web applications these announcements feel like some paradigm shift that we hoped for - and envisioned - for quite a long time. But that there are so many browsers now, that rival each other for the JavaScript performance crown, is fabulous. At least three browsers come with sophisticated JS engines that are up for the challenge to bring JavaScript execution speed into absolutely amazing regions: Webkit SquirrelFish Extreme, Firefox Tracemonkey and Google Chrome V8.

You shouldn't just sit back and enjoy this competition of JavaScript engines from a distance. Get ready with your qooxdoo rich internet application. There has never been a better time for creating qooxdoo-based RIAs!

While most of us (Fabian, Thomas and Andreas) are on vacation we were working hard on the documentation and the mailing list this week.

Bugzilla

The Bugzilla cleanup is now finally done. All bugs are sorted into the system. Sebastian has written a few paragraphs on how to deal with bug reports. Basically all defects are directly added to the next milestone of the specific branch to get fixed as soon as possible. All of these bugs are assigned to somebody who works on this one (or delegates it further). All other reports are regarded as enhancements. These are priorized to show which ones we regard as next steps in our development. Anybody could help us with these. Voting is possible to let us increase the priority of specific reports. We listen to your feedback.

Google Chrome

It seems that the guys at Google have changed the user agent identfier through one of the last revisions. We have updated the user agent detection to correctly detect the new Chrome version now. For users depending on Google Chrome support (if there are already any), we suggest to use the SVN version for now. Through the holiday season there are still some weeks until 0.8.1 will be released.

Documentation

• Alex has added some documentation on how to use inline widgets with qooxdoo. Inline widgets are basically isles in a classic HTML dominated web page.
• A new document by Sebastian explains the appearance system and some of the internals. Especially interesting for users which are highly interested in understanding and make use of the full power of the appearance system.
• Image clipping and combining talks about the generator and how to use it to combine images and to the reduce the effects of latency through the use of image sprites.
• qooxdoo 0.8 comes with a lot of nice low-level APIs to directly work with the DOM of HTML or XML documents. Alex's new documentation explains the current set of features and tries to give an overview to the extensive set of classes and functions.
• Improved API documentation of popups, tooltips, tree virtual and progressive.

Framework

The framework itself has also got some love, too. Mostly this affects bug fixes. This week we have fixed 37 bugs. Our cleaned up Bugzilla really helps to get a better view at the real defects to fix them with high priority. Topics included:

• The image handling, where scaled and unscaled image now behave correctly in all browsers
• Fixed support for "removeAll" which had made issues in 0.8 (clearing a SelectBox, etc.)
• Added support for "input" event when typing into password fields
• Fixed a few issues when dynamically changing the content of List based widgets (e.g. SelectBox)

Further some improvements were made as well:

• Better open/close symbols are now used in the tree widget
• Changed appearance values for undefined. These have been modified from string "undefined" to simply use the primitive undefined value.
• Improved styling of disabled buttons and text fields
• Placement algorithm changed to use bounds instead of size hint for greater stability
• Added completely new visibility queue to better take track of visible widgets. The information is used by the appearance system to do not apply state changes to invisible parts of an application.
• Improved constructor of Widget for better performance when creating new instances
• More memory friendly handling of layout children through the removal of one previously used array which is most of the time identical to the normal children array.
• Minor tweaks and cleanups to the default variant set were made (rev. 16331)
• Better text color inheritance support in Modern theme

The Demo Browser, API Viewer and Feed Reader were updated to the latest version.

That's the news for this week. Until next week.

Greetings, friends of qooxdoo! We're looking back on the first week after the 0.8 release. Unsurprisingly, it was pretty much filled with documentation, bugs juggling, and other deeds of entropy reduction. And, as we all know, after release is before release.

Demobrowser and IE

The last weekend provided a bit of flurry when it became apparent that the online version of the Demobrowser had issues in IE6 and IE7 browsers. Demos had to be activated more than once, in order to see them running. The issue was due to the special loading mechanism deployed in the Demobrowser app. It has been fixed online, and local installations didn't have that issue anyway.

Bugzilla Clean-up

We have tried to tidy up our bugzilla database, setting some conventions about how bugs shall be treated, to ensure a sound treatment of all of them. Components like "wishes" have been replaced by more meaningful ones. The idea is to have a component structure that mirrors functional units within qooxdoo-the-project. A lot of bugs have been reviewed, re-categorized, re-prioritized. We started piling up bugs for 0.8.1, and are looking at using the assigned/unassigned and the 'enhancement' feature of bugs to set up some sort of categorization and workflow. There are still some bugs open for being moved around. This is planned to be completed during the next week.

Documentation

Documentation for the current 0.8 release has been heavily revamped and extended. The overall structure has been reworked, and many articles have seen substantial extension. Please have a look and offer your feedback. Here is a selection of articles that have been affected:

• Interaction: Mouse, Keyboard & Focus Events
  
• Theming: Appearance, Custom Themes etc.
  
• How to create custom widgets
• Details on how to work with selections
• Dealing with Drag&Drop
• Some technical details to focus and element handling

More tutorials and technology documentation is planned for the next week. Please feel free to give feedback and ask questions. This is the best time to do so!

Fixed Bugs

This week also some bugs were closed. Sebastian has fixed major issues with the Grid decorator and the location code which mainly affected Internet Explorer 6 and 7. Johnny has fixed some some quirks in the API Viewer when Opera is used. He also has improved the way the API Viewer deals with links to hidden items e.g. protected methods. Internet Explorer now shows correct syntax highlighting for code segments in the API Viewer.

Contributions

This week saw the porting of HtmlArea and the UploadWidget to 0.8. However the HtmlArea has still some rough edges, so if you discover some bugs don't hesitate to report them. Thanks to all who contributed, especially Alex and Petr.

That's it for this week. Be in touch next time.

Greetings, qooxdoodians! Still breathless from yesterday's 0.8 release (and
maybe with a little hang-over here and there), we nevertheless stick
unwaveringly to our weekly report tradition. So read on!

Release qooxdoo 0.8

Yesterday saw the landing of version 0.8 of qooxdoo. This child of love and labor, with roughly 13 months of incubation and several thousands of SVN commits that went into it, was friendly received so far and we hope for further reception. So spread the word!

Memory Leaks

We have made major improvements to the internal object registration mechanism in 0.8. Many ideas came from Stefan Hansel. Thanks again to him for the many hours spent to identify and work around these issues. qooxdoo 0.8 is now without memory leaks - even in IE - which means that it is now even more practical to be used for enterprise application development. Details on the improvements will be posted next week. Stay tuned.

PNG's vs. IE7

During the very last days of 0.8 development some users started sending us screenshots and reports about bad rendering results of our Modern theme in Internet Explorer 7. This seems to only affect a small group of users, but for them it is not possible to combine stretched PNG images e.g. a image tag with increased dimensions with a opacity filter. There were many artifacts in the resulting application. The workaround now implemented in 0.8 is to use the AlphaImageLoader filter in IE7 as well. Normally it is common belief that IE7 supports all kind of PNG images natively, but it seems that in combination with other filters it might still be the better choice to use the AlphaImageLoader explicitly. Many thanks for the time spent by Maria Siebert. She helped us a lot with identifying the issue and applying a final fix (right before release).

Twitter

We started a qooxdoo twitter stream this week. Hopes are that this will give a more "real-time" insight into our project whereabouts for those of you who care, especially in times of higher attention like around releases. There is also a new friendfeed that combines this twitter stream with the news feed from this blog.

Vacation

None of the qooxdoo core developers here at 1&1 was preferring a summer vacation over finishing work on qooxdoo 0.8. Well, at least it looks like it, given the vacation schedule: in September, all of us will be gone. Of course, at different times and with a decent overlap. Anyway, mailing list support should be fine at all times in September, but please be patient if not all of your request can be answered right away. September isn't only about absence: we are looking forward to a new colleague, starting here as a full-time qooxdoo developer on Sept 15, 2008. That's actually the day I'll be back from my vacation, which starts now

Again, thanks for all your support. Take qooxdoo 0.8 for a test drive. Enjoy.

A rather short weekly status report this time, as much work has gone into yesterday's

First Release Candidate

qooxdoo 0.8-rc1 is available and ready for a test ride. Please read the announcement, that asks for your help in identifying and reporting any open issues. Thanks for your support!

Contributions

qooxdoo-contrib is the project's infrastructure for contributions to the framework. It allows for an successful collaboration on new features and works as an incubator for features that are still experimental. As with other parts of the framework, it is constantly improving, and with the number of contributions. The build process in 0.8 (as in 0.7) allows for transparently integrating contributions. Once there are contributions available or about to become available for 0.8 this will certainly be further polished and extended. Besides the rather technical details of seemless and user-friendly integration, the overall visibility of contributions is also being addressed during an ongoing improvement, e.g. providing individual downloads or hosted online demos.

Memory Leaks

Thanks to the thorough and repeated testing of Stefan Hansel, memory consumption became one of the hot spots of 0.8 framework development last week. During the course of careful analysis and systematic retrofitting of the existing memory management facilities, memory consumption could be significantly reduced, particularly in IE. A few bugs responsible for or related to memory leaks could also be identified and resolved. In legacy 0.7 some issues seem to remain, somewhat different to 0.8, that may have more of an practical impact than expected, but this requires more analysis.

Outlook

Plans continue to have a qooxdoo 0.8 final release available next week. Keep your fingers crossed.

A rather short weekly status report this time, as much work has gone into yesterday's

First Release Candidate

qooxdoo 0.8-rc1 is available and ready for a test ride. Please read the announcement, that asks for your help in identifying and reporting any open issues. Thanks for your support!

Contributions

qooxdoo-contrib is the project's infrastructure for contributions to the framework. It allows for an successful collaboration on new features and works as an incubator for features that are still experimental. As with other parts of the framework, it is constantly improving, and with the number of contributions. The build process in 0.8 (as in 0.7) allows for transparently integrating contributions. Once there are contributions available or about to become available for 0.8 this will certainly be further polished and extended. Besides the rather technical details of seemless and user-friendly integration, the overall visibility of contributions is also being addressed during an ongoing improvement, e.g. providing individual downloads or hosted online demos.

Memory Leaks

Thanks to the thorough and repeated testing of Stefan Hansel, memory consumption became one of the hot spots of 0.8 framework development last week. During the course of careful analysis and systematic retrofitting of the existing memory management facilities, memory consumption could be significantly reduced, particularly in IE. A few bugs responsible for or related to memory leaks could also be identified and resolved. In legacy 0.7 some issues seem to remain, somewhat different to 0.8, that may have more of an practical impact than expected, but this requires more analysis.

Outlook

Plans continue to have a qooxdoo 0.8 final release available next week. Keep your fingers crossed.

We're gearing up for the final release of 0.8!

Releases

Plans are to have a first release candidate of qooxdoo 0.8 available during the week, with the final release to be shipped this August. As we are approaching those next milestones, we really appreciate your feedback. Please do not hesitate to file bug reports.

Framework

Image Handling

Working with images in 0.8 has arrived at a very powerful level. For instance, a new low-level class has been added to create images for decoration purposes that takes care of all the images combination (a.k.a image slices), alpha transparent PNGs, various new repeat modes like scale-x or scale-y, etc. Full support for alpha transparent PNGs in IE6 in decorators and icons is included. Images in qooxdoo can now be scaled to the size given explicitly. This auto-scaling is disabled by default, but can easily be enabled with the boolean property "scale".

Hints are being output during app development when using images which qualify as good candidates for being combined. This is another smart helper to support the developer in creating low-latency applications. What such a combined image could look like? See some combined radio buttons and check boxes (taken from the List demo).

Polishing

A permanent task towards the 0.8 release. A few highlights: A lot of decoration images of the "Modern" theme are now combined for better application performance and reduced latency at load time. Many widget demos have got a lot of love. Code should be more concise, functionality be fixed where needed. API documentation is more complete, particularly by adding a lot of new class descriptions which were missing previously. To mention a few widgets explicitly that improved during the week: SelectBox, ComboBox, GroupBox, Spinner, Splitpane

More improvements

• Decorators are now fully compatible to both box models and therefore are independent of the doctype.
• Added support for centering Atoms. For instance this is used by buttons that center the label when more space is available (e.g. typical "OK" buttons).
• Property inheritance has been modified a bit to convert the "inherit" value automatically to "null". Previously, apply routines and getters may have received a string value "inherit", which caused some problems and made code more complex than needed in some cases.
• Performance and memory usage tweaks for Widget and qx.html.Element, being core components of any qooxdoo GUI application.
• Moved widget specific layout managers from qx.ui.layout to more specific namespaces (e.g. menu, splitpane, ...).
• Refactored and cleaned up static resources of qooxdoo, now only including blank.gif and blank.html, which are theme-independent and used by more than one class.

Unit Testing

All framework test classes have been moved from their old name space under testrunner.test to the framework class hierarchy itself. They dwell now under qx.test.

Applications

Apiviewer and Testrunner have been revamped to include a smaller amount of application data (class documentation and test classes, respectively) in their local builds. This makes development of the apps easier. Application data for the Apiviewer now only encompasses the Apiviewer's own classes and the framework classes they inherit from. The Testrunner only loads a small demo unit test class, which is maintained locally. Formerly, both apps included larger amounts of data pertaining to the framework library. This data is now available under the framework itself (see further down).

Tool chain

Downloads

We reviewed our release deliverables and refactored the kits to include just one: an enhanced SDK.

The build kit which contained pre-build applications and the quickstart kit which essentially contained an all-encompassing qooxdoo framework library were seen as of little practical value. The applications are easily evaluated through their online versions, and the new build system can create custom libraries to anybody's content. A pre-built package of the low-level layer is expected for a future release, though, that will be an alternative to other DOM-oriented libraries like Prototype or jQuery.

The many download variants occasionally stirred confusion as to which kit to choose. The reduction to one makes it trivial to pick the right kit to download.

The new SDK mirrors the new repository structure and will include a pre-build version of the Apiviewer, including all the framework classes, so people have a reference immediately at hand. The other applications have to be built first, as usual. Apiviewer and Testrunner components have been stripped down to contain only limited application data for their local development. They previously used framework data and this data is now re-created running the api and test jobs in the framework directly. The ensuing SDK will be around 20MB download size which still seems feasible for an enhanced framework package.

Skeleton and Application Creation

A script has been added to our tool chain that will create a new application from the Skeleton for you. If you invoke tool/bin/create-application.py with a few parameters, a skeleton will be copied to the desired location with all settings already adapted. You can immediately create source and build versions of it, and expand it into your envisioned application.

To this end, the skeleton will be included as source tree in future SDK packages. It is not intended to be usable in place though, since many files are only templates and need expansion through the create-application script.

We hope this will ease the process of getting up to speed when creating custom applications.

Generator

The generic job target test has been implemented and can be used by Skeleton-based applications (with a source-oriented test-source shortly to follow). Running the test job in an application will create an application-specific Testrunner application in a local test folder, which allows you to run application-specific unit test classes. An example is the application of this job to the qooxdoo framework itself.

Locales processing has been revamped. An independent translate key will re-create your .po files at any time you invoke it. A locales key in the config controls which locales will be processed. New translation files are created on the fly, but old files pretaining to a locale not listed are left intact. The code generating jobs compile-source/compile-dist also evaluate a locales key, and the data is included in the generated code accordingly. The old localize config key has been removed.

Contributions

qooxdoo-contrib is the framework's infrastructure for contributions as well as experimental features. It allows for easy and convenient setup, development, maintenance and release management of contributed sub projects. It is constantly being improved, so you might want to check-out the currently available contributions.

Most of the contributions are not labeled "ready for 0.8", yet. Some of them are rather independent of the mostly GUI-related changes of 0.8, so they could rather easily be adjusted. Others, like additional widgets, will of course need to be migrated. Don't expect many authors and maintainers to start looking into migration before a final 0.8 is available and/or they actually start to migrate their custom applications that involve their contributions.

Given the recent and also the anticipated future improvements (including better integration with the framework and better outside visibility and promotion), qooxdoo-contrib is a key ingredient for an ongoing healthy and flexible growth of the project. If you consider adding a new contribution or improving an existing one, check out the preliminary documentation, and don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions.

Outlook

Again a very productive week is over. Stay tuned for the upcoming first release candidate of qooxdoo 0.8.

Today (08-08-08) could have been the perfect target date for qooxdoo 0.8, right?

Releases

While this wasn't intended, we are getting closer to 0.8 final nevertheless. Last week a first beta was made available, and work now concentrates on the next pre-release. As you might have seen in the road map, and given the progress and scope of the current code base, we plan to have a first release candidate available soon. qooxdoo 0.8 final is planned to ship this August.

Repository re-organization

As we have briefly reported a repository re-organization has taken place earlier this week. All that is left to say is that things look fairly smooth again. The trunk seems to be in good shape, and the former backend part has been successfully migrated to the qooxdoo-contrib repository (thanks to Fabian who did all the tedious SVN juggling). It now dwells there in the form of several independent "Rpc*" projects (see next section).

RPC Servers

qooxdoo offers an advanced RPC mechanism for direct calls to server-side methods. It allows you to write true client/server applications without having to worry about the communication details.

The qooxdoo RPC is based on JSON-RPC as the serialization and method call protocol. All parameters and return values are automatically converted between JavaScript and the server-side language. qooxdoo provides such optional server backends for Java, PHP, Perl (and Python currently hosted externally).

Those existing RPC servers have been relocated in accordance with the backend contributors. The are now available in qooxdoo-contrib. Not only did it allow for a more concise qooxdoo frontend file structure, but now also an independent development process and own release management (e.g. for hotfixes) is possible.

Your favorite language is missing? Feel free to write your own qooxdoo RPC server, it is fairly easy. If you follow the rules of the Server Writer Guide, you should end up with a conformant implementation.

Ravelled-out Tool Chain

We have a new script in the working called createProject which simplifies the creation of new qooxdoo applications. You just will have to provide a name and optionally the top level namespace and the script will create the qooxdoo application into a new directory. The application is already configured and ready to build and run.

The private optimizer has got a little bug fix to also compress/rename privates created through a simple assignment.

Ruminative Framework

Shadow

We have added generic support for shadows on top level widgets like windows, menus or tool tips. The shadows can be styled by any decorator. Shadows are now used in both the classic and the modern theme.

Table

After the port of the table we fixed many small issues and a bunch of long open bugs reported against the 0.7 table. We have even backported most of the fixes into the legacy_0_7_x branch.

Theming

• More work of polishing the Modern theme.
• Minor changes at the feed reader application. Mainly changed the appearance of the windows to better adapt the look of the Modern theme.
• Another improvement included icon themes. The current trunk contains a few more icons Tango and Oxygen have in common. Also some icon names were improved to make them more consistent.
• Work to improve the performance and structure of the decoration themes have been started this week. Currently the trunk still has some issues introduced with the new code. The situation will hopefully improve during the first days of this week.
• The ''Rounded'' border was removed for the moment. It is currently not recommended to use the VML/CSS3 based renderer because of a few display inconsistancies. There are good alternatives however like the ''Beveled'' or ''Grid'' decorator which are also used heavily by the ''Modern'' theme.
• Several bugfixes.

Miscellaneous

• Added support for context menus on widgets. These menus are automatically attached to the contextmenu event and are automatically placed to the mouse cursor.
• Added support for cancelling the native context menu. By default this is enabled when using qooxdoo in an application like environment through the usage of qx.ui.root.Application.
• Added ''getSortedSelection'' to all selection managers. This returns the selection sorted by the occourence in the list/tree instead of the sequence the items where sorted.
• Imporved drag&drop support, now with full API documentation. Added support for getting the related (current drag or drop widget, depending on the context) and original target (the widget which is hovered) during drag&drop events.
• The ''iconOpened'' property was removed from the Tree. It is now handled as in every other qooxdoo widget using a state together with the matching appearance theme.
• The Tree has got full sub control support which means that the icons, labels etc. are now easily accessible inside the appearance theme for improved customization options.
• Renamed alignment utility to PlaceUtil and methods from ''alignToXXX'' to ''placeToXXX'' after discussion with native speakers. Thank you for that type of feedback.
• Fixed SelectBox and ComboBox to behave correctly during hovering items. The selection was decoupled between the list and the text field to allow a quick selection during mouse over. Thanks to the community for the feedback to this issue. Sometimes it is easy to miss these details.

That's it for this week's round up. Take care!