From the moment I saw qooxdoo, I felt they had an excellent & very polished set of functionality as well as insanely rich UI controls but I never took the time to look at the commitment that the team had put into this project. So when qooxdoo project lead Andreas Ecker buzzed me to tell me that the framework had reached 1.0, I decided to take a peak at the history of the project (at least in terms of first available downloads). I looked at the QooxDoo download repo and was surprised by how mature this project is. When you consider that the project was first registered on SourceForge in January, 2005 and made their first available version of qooxdoo on May 9th, 2005, it shows that an incredible amount of effort & dedication has gone into cultivating the project and framework.
The results are very obvious as qooxdoo v1.0 sports one of the richest feature sets of any JavaScript framework. Apart from the standard JavaScript syntactical sugar and DOM traversal/manipulation capabilities found in all JS libs, qooxdoo’s suite of UI controls are outstanding and are comparable to any of the best UI libs available. Looking at their showcase of demo apps, you can see how appealing the controls & layout capabilities are.
And it really does focus on the “framework” aspect of things with support for internationalization, dependency resolution, integrated unit & functional testing, build management and more.
There is much more offered in qooxdoo, however, than just a large set of widgets, powerful layout managers and virtually unlimited theming capabilities. As a full-fledged application framework, it comes with an integrated, platform-independent tool chain that covers the entire range of app development and deployment – code validation, JS compiling and linking, compression and optimization, just to name a few. Other built-in tools allow for easy unit testing, automated GUI testing, searchable API reference, or cross-browser debugging a la Firebug. Mastering large-scale JavaScript applications is greatly facilitated by build process features such as automatically combined images (”sprites”) or transparently breaking up an app into various parts that are loaded on-demand.
So congratulations to the qooxdoo for reaching a major milestone in your project. The methodical approach for your releases has certainly paid off as qooxdoo v1.0 looks great!