Jonathan Weiß

On Thursday we finally rolled out the best qooxdoo release off all times.

Within the last 13 months 26 developers made over 6,000 commits to our SVN repository and crunched 294 bugs. This all resulted in an effort of more than six man-years.
This release is not only the one with the most changes but also the best tested and documented one.

For this version we focused on two domains: the GUI Toolkit and the Tool Chain.
The GUI Toolkit is a complete rewrite of our old system built on top of a low-level DOM layer. This layer is designed to be replaceable: how über cool would it be to render widgets in SVG or Canvas once the technology is ready? ;-) The layer can be used stand-alone to provide generic and normalized access to the DOM and browser objects.
Another important point is the enhanced support for designing widgets. We added a container that lays behind the widget itself and can be filled with various content to draw borders, shadows, backgrounds and more.

qooxdoo 0.8 Demo Brower

Our Tool Chain is not Makefile-based any longer and does not require a bunch of Unix tools. The only requirement for the new Tool Chain is Python, which comes bundled with all good operation systems and can be installed easily under Windows.
There are many benefits from this new system (e.g. automatic generation of CSS Sprites, integrated internationalization support and easy editable JSON-based configuration files) which are essential for developing and deploying enterprise applications.

If you have not already done so, this is the perfect time to start working with qooxdoo. ;-)

Some people thought that this should had happened earlier after my (second, I dare to say) switch to the Mac, but it happened not until last week: I switched to TextMate as my main editor.

I have been using Eclipse for nearly three years now — and it is a really great development environment — but there are just to many stumble stones that prevent me from working the way I usually do. For instance, every once in a wile I can not type an more or even scroll through my code as Eclipse is busy updating the workspace. Perhaps it has just found the cache folder and tries to index its content – I can only guess.
However, the real pain-in-the... was the interaction with SourceForge.net's SVN services. I do not want to start writing about it, because it would only end in explicit blogging, so just have a look at this collation of screenshots:

Eclipse problems...

TextMate is fast, handy, works as "it should" and is fully-loaded with lots of time-saving and customizable features. This is the first time I thought someone has thought well during developing an editor. Just take a look at these three four features which just make so much sense:

• Select some text and enter " and the selected texts gets surrounded be with ".
• The cursor position or currently selected text is stored for every document.
• The tree's open elements are saved automatically and restored when opening a project.
• The project-wide search uses a cache.

TextMate just rocks!

There are many pages with detailed information about what makes TextMate the superior editor, but I want to concentrate on facts and features that are important for me and increase my productivity or enhance my workflow.

Features

• Bookmark handling
• Execute shell commands
• Snippets
• Folding
• Source control handling

Shortcuts

• Search (in project) as you type
• Show file in project
• Show file in finder
• Go to symbol
• Quicksearch
• Cycle through opened documents

Did I mentioned how fast it is and how few memory it consumes? ;-)

Here are some of my settings (basically optimized for qooxdoo development):

My files

• Color set (based on IR_WHITE)
• qooxdoo snippets
• Regular expression to ignore folders

Just download the demo and try it on your own. You will not be disappointed. :-)

Greetings! On Friday we released qooxdoo 0.8-beta1 one day delayed to our schedule due to some SVN problems our host sourceforge.net had to fight with. The general performance still is not on a good level, but at least we can continue working.
Anyway, this release came shortly after the last one but still offers many nice features and lots of new stuff to play with. ;-)
As we are eating our own dog food we started porting applications to 0.8 to gain experience in migrating applications and also to test the framework with real-life operations. The Demo Browser and API Viewer already have been ported and the Testrunner will follow soon.
This release includes many new features as Focus Roots and the Text Selection API.
You will find detailed information, as usual, in the release notes.

May the source be with you! :-)