Ajax Girl

qooxdoo 0.8 has been released and it appears to have a lot of big changes. Andreas Ecker told us a little about it:

While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number
over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the
UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved
substantially.

qooxdoo 0.8 features a complete rewrite of the GUI toolkit. It is state-of-the-art and supports all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). The GUI toolkit has a layered architecture: on-top of a low-level DOM-oriented layer (that might be used as a separate library), it includes a large set of widgets and layout managers (perfect for building RIAs). Online demos are available.

Users can very easily implement additional custom widgets or layouts to fit their individual needs. Theming of widgets continues to be independent from the widget code itself, and now allows for virtually
unlimited styling possibilities, e.g. rounded borders, gradients, shadows. While qooxdoo comes with two new attractive themes, it is also easy to create custom themes, without any CSS knowledge required.

Besides the exciting changes in the GUI toolkit, the developer tool chain has also been improved to a large extend. It frees the developer from such tedious and complex tasks as compressing and optimizing the JS code, resolving dependencies between classes, using a JS linker to produce a custom build of the app ready for deployment. Some further highlights of the comprehensive, built-in tooling include: searchable API reference, internationalization, source code validation, unit testing, combined images, and much more. The entire tool chain is platform-independent: all that is needed is a working Python installation, which is trivial to setup on any operating system, including MS Windows.

While API documentation is quite complete already, wiki documentation is still being updated to account for all the changes and improvements. Download the qooxdoo 0.8 package, and see the
included index.html to get started quickly.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/378172890/qooxdoo-08-new-gui-toolkit-and-tool-chain