Some aspects of qooxdoo have been improved after the qooxdoo 0.5.x releases to make it an even more professional and complete JavaScript framework. Many issues that have been brought up and discussed on the mailing list before have been addressed. This includes integration with other libraries, comprehensive documentation and a more powerful list view.

The most fundamental modifications started out as early proofs-of-concept in a separate branch to not make the current SVN trunk unusable during this major reorganisation. This development branch was called “namespaces”. The contents of this branch went back into the trunk. The trunk finally lead to the release 0.6 after an prior release candidate 0.6-RC1.

A couple of significant differences:

qooxdoo will be entirely based on namespaces. The current somewhat naive usage of simple class names and global objects will be replaced. For example, a full qualified class name will read qx.ui.form.Button instead of QxButton. Albeit longer, namespaces allow for close-to-100% compatibility and integration with other libraries and a powerful organisation of classes/packages within such a large framework. It also makes it very easy to find the source file for any class, since the source hierarchy is layed out in the same way as the namespace hierarchy. Scripts to assist during migration from user applications based on release 0.5.x will be made available.

API documentation is much improved over the 0.5.x versions. A new automated API documentation generation tool allows developers to provide documentation within the code (similar to JavaDoc comments), which is then extracted in a process involving a full-featured JavaScript parser. It produces quite a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate API reference. More info...

A truly complete JavaScript framework has to have convincing support for building and deploying customer applications. Based on the strength of the included JavaScript parser and powerful dependency resolution mechanisms, it takes users a single command and an appropriate configuration file to compress and optimize any JavaScript-based application code and link it against the qooxdoo library. The final scripts as well as any static resources (images, html, flash, etc.) and themes (appearance, colors, etc.) are seemlessly deployed into the user’s environment. It is equally easy to generate a taylor-made API documentation describing all customer classes along with only the qooxdoo classes that are actually used in the particular application. More info...

Existing limitations in the current QxListView implementation (e.g. horizontal scrolling) are being addressed by a new, more feature-rich implementation (called qx.ui.table.Table). Similar to QxListView Table is a “virtual” widget which allows large datasets to be available for display while rendering only those that are actually visible. This provides a huge benefit in rendering speed. The Table implementation includes advanced concepts like cell renderers. It is still work in progress, so see source/example/Table_1.html, generated API reference or source code for more info.

To allow for advanced client-server communication, a new layer above the transport implementations has been created that uses JSON. Both a Java and a PHP JSON-RPC server are provided as example backends. A server writer’s guide is available to implement new RPC servers in other languages or to adjust existing solutions.