qooxdoo

I've been using heavily qooxdoo for nearly one year. During that period the framework has evolved considerably. I've had to migrate my code several times in this short period. The good news is that it has been in a great extent an automatic process, thanks to the migration scripts that are included with each new qooxdoo release.

One of the things I like, it is the good support in the forums. Many times, problems have been solved in a matter of minutes.

Its source code is quite clean and understandable. It has allowed me to do small contributions. It has been refactored many times, to get it more clean and less redundant. Now working with qooxdoo is much easier, as more documentation is available. For the lastest release (0.7), the documentation was available even before it was released.

At first, used to HTML, I was a little lost. Samples were a good starting point. But now, I'm able to built very polished apps, that don't miss any desktop-like functionality.

The learning curve hasn't been very steep. As everything is Javascript, updating the GUI after a AJAX request is eased a lot.

Unlike a regular desktop toolkit, you have control over nearly everything, as the source code is available. JS as a dynamic language allows easily to alter the behavior of any object.

Javascript is more expressive than it looks at first. Closures are a very powerful feature, that allows not to lose the context, when processing an event. Events are very used in a GUI app, and even more if you use AJAX. Qooxdoo adds to Javascript OO features from other languages: Mixins, Interfaces, calling the overriden super method that aren't present originally in JS.

I haven't had any cross-browser problems, except for the poor performance of IE6 with complicated pages.

The look and feel is separated from the logic, thanks to its theme support. I'm going even to try to let the end user to define the colors, and some other appearance features.

Qooxdoo is unobstrusive, you can build a custom version with just what you need. It can be combined with other Javascript frameworks.

4 out of 4 users found the following review helpful.

I've been working with Qooxdoo for a couple of months now and I can definitely say it's been worth the investment. It's well-rounded, pretty-well thought out, evolving nicely, has a plethora of widgets, controls and other goodies to play with, has very nice docs available, browsable API's, lots of working demos, an online playground to quickly try out your own code, a very active mailing list, and lots of other good stuff. I think on the whole that it perhaps may not quite be to the same level (YET!) as EXTJS, but it's definitely headed in the right direction and getting there. And it's VERY usable. I honestly have no idea why it isn't more widely known and used. It has everything you could possibly want except maybe a good "Gui-Builder". But I don't particularly consider that a bad thing-- except it might be nice to use one to mock up screens or something now and then. All in all, I'd have to give Qooxdoo a VERY solid 8 out of 10 rating for maturity, usability, overall documentation and support, and of course ability to make what you need out of the available parts and pieces. Two thumbs up! Kudus to Qooxdoo !!