qooxdoo 0.8 is a milestone. Unlike the minor jump in version number may suggest, this release includes tons of changes and improvements. In particular the UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved substantially.

After qooxdoo 0.8-rc1 the following changes were made:

• Thanks to the input of various volunteers, the following translations were completed for both farmework and feedreader: en, de, es (Camilo), fr (Dan), it (Alessandro), sv (Henric).
• Added all missing destructors (and destructor entries) which resulted in zero additional hints reported by our internal memory leak testing set.
• Introduced many enhancements to reduce the size of maps which are dynamically reused a lot. e.g. queues, registries, etc. Previously used hash codes are now being reused. This really solves to keep memory consumption constant in IE when dealing with interim disposes, for instance when parts of the GUI are replaced with other parts (and the old parts are disposed). Thanks to Stefan for stamina, patience and ideas.
• Fixed issues in Array.min/Array.max methods.
• Updated CLDR data from unicode.org to version 1.6.1
• Improved performance of application shutdown. Switching to a new web page is faster up to a factor of three.
• Improved checks of event handling to prevent the possibility to fire events with no target information given.
• Minor fix of event useraction to not being fired when the application is already disposed.
• The HTML element (integral part of the whole GUI system) now allows to use existing elements instead of always having to create new ones. This is used by the decorator system for improved performance.
• Fixed support for Escape key in Safari.
• Added example for MessageBus and fixed implementation to be compatible to 0.8

• Many theme fixes for a better compatibility to different systems and machine setups.
• Fixed a major issue, that only showed up at a few IE7. There seems to be a conflict between the opacity filter and the display of stretched PNG images when using an IMG tag. Now the AlphaImageLoader for all possible PNGs is used in IE7 as well to fix these issues. Thanks to the mailing list for the tremendous support and Maria for the great collaboration.
• Added qxType for improved DOM debugging possibilities during development (only active in debug:on variant)
• Fixed a minor typo in Canvas layout that caused issues with maximum sizes
• Major fix to scrollbar handling. Previously it could happen that the scrollbar was rendered into an invisible area. Especially when toggling the content size.
• Improved queues for appearance, widget logic and dispose to be more friendly to IE‘s memory issues (as described above).
• Fixed issues with additive selection mode in List, Tree, etc.
• The unit test interface classes have made it into the framework. They are available under qx.dev.unit. Formerly, they were available only under the testrunner namespace in the application section. There is revised documentation on using this package.

• Added missing MenuBar class with custom appearance in Modern and Classic theme. Basically a toolbar with menu buttons, but with a look more typical for menu bars.
• Significantly improved keyboard support and cross-browser stability for interactive usage of ComboBox and DateField. The Alt+Down key combination should work much more reliably in this version.
• The DateField now works properly as a regular form element in qooxdoo. It supports all typical keyboard events now and correctly fires events for any changes made.
• Fixed issues with keyboard navigation in Table widget.
• Major improvements to ColorSelector and ColorPopup for better interaction.
• Converted ColorPopup to make use of sub controls. This was the last widget which still used manually created and managed widgets.
• Fixed interaction in SplitPane widget. There were a few oddities with wrong positioning of the splitter after releasing the mouse button.

• More polishing of qooxdoo themes, further consolidation to use more semantic identifiers. Replaced “black” decorator with “main” decorator.
• Fixed rendering of decorators in IE6, especially the small cells of the Grid decorator made issues.
• Improved default styling of tree widget in Modern theme
• Fixed tiny scrollbar issues, in that the knob of the scrollbar could get too small. The new version comes with some minimum sizes to improve usability.

• Added common header for all included qooxdoo applications

• Fixed a lot of API Viewer issues related to cross-linking of classes, methods and properties.
• Improved search table, for instance to fix all the odd scrolling issues
• Fixed some race-conditions in API Viewer during load of individual data files.
• Excluded qx.test and qx.legacy from framework API Viewer
• Made more use of combined images for an improved start-up time

• Automatic detection of system locale was re-enabled.
• Fixed long-term issue with wrong feed URLs

• Reworked design to have a consistent look among applications. Introduced flexible pane handling. SmarterSplitPane usage. Improved logging console stability
• Added examples for Separator support. Now available for Box layouts and Dock layout.
• A SplitPane demo is now part of the widget section.

• Open up first levels of navigation tree at start-up for better usability.
• Added tests for detecting correct destruction of widgets by means of mass creation/disposal of widgets, followed-up by checks of the internal data structures.

• Command-line parameter usability and stability improved for create-application.py script.
• Improved handling for applications when paths contain spaces. Previously, there has been issues for users of the native Python package under Windows, and for developers whose project had a path with spaces. Both issues are fixed in the final release.

• Many overview pages for the framework documentation were added. This should offer a good initial overview for new users.
• API documentation was added and completed. qooxdoo 0.8 is the first release that has almost full API coverage.
• Improved content and design of the top-level index.html of the SDK.

For a complete overview of changes during 0.8 development please also consult the previous release notes:

• qooxdoo 0.8-rc1 (2008-08-21)
• qooxdoo 0.8-beta1 (2008-08-01)
• qooxdoo 0.8-alpha2 (2008-07-11)
• qooxdoo 0.8-alpha1 (2008-05-20)

Some previously existing features are not available in 0.8, for instance:

• ListView widget: superseded by Table widget
• Flash widget: to be introduced again in a later release
• #955: Tree lines not supported
• Some of the classes in qx.legacy are not available (and useful) as regular 0.8 classes, so they most likely won’t be migrated.

For more information on deprecated features please consult the Migration Notes (from 0.7.x).

A Migration Guide (from 0.7.x) is available to port existing apps from 0.7.x to 0.8.