Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
Qooxdoo releases version 0.6 RC1
Qooxdoo (pronounced “cooks-do”) has released version 0.6 RC 1. This framework has come a long way since our first post on it over a year ago. Qooxdoo is a LGPL javascript framework with a rich set of widgets and supports namespaces, events, drag and drop, and layouts. For a quick look, check out the demos (particularily the “at-a-glance demo”), or go straight to the download page.
Details on this release:
- widgets based on the on the features of the included layout managers, no need to know HTML or CSS
- built with class-based OO and leverages object-oriented JavaScript. Uses namespaces and does not modify or extend native JavaScript types.
- full set of widgets similiar to that of native desktop applications, with support for keyboard navigation, focus and tab handling and drag & drop
- abstract transport layer supports queues, timeouts and implementations via XHR, Iframes and scripts with support for event based programming.
- build system (generator) to package only the needed classes for optimization when in production
Does anyone have some real world experience with this framework? Maybe some comparisons to Dojo or some of the commercial toolkits?
4.3 rating from 26 votes
It’s interesting to see such a fat client like UI in the web browser, but I think fat client, or really the rebirth of client server UI’s, in web browsers is really a mistake. HTML is so much more free and dynamic than cookie cutter UIs of the desktop world. Just because you have a tree, list, and table doesn’t mean you have to represent all of your apps the same. HTML allows you to break the mold in each of your apps.
This library creates UIs that are single page. How is a google going to crawl your web site and index it? This is very web unfriendly to the fabric of the web.
HTML is evolving past the fat client UIs. Notice in the last 5+ years how much thick UIs are trying to imitate web based UIs. Confabulator, vector based UI toolkits like WinFX, and use of web pages in thick apps. Web evolution is causing evolution in other UI areas that were stagnant for so long. One positive thing to say about this library is that Javascript and AJAX are bringing the web world and the fat UI world together in a way that fat UIs can’t do. And that’s good thing.
Maybe qooxdoo isn’t useful for typical web pages. That may be true. But that’s not the focus of qooxdoo. It’s built to make web applications simpler. In web applications (for example intranet application, route planers, organizers, whatever…) you don’t need to support for the google indexer for example.
qooxdoo does not need to look like typical applications from your desktop. There are already many applications based on qooxdoo which looks more or less differently.
@Charlie:
You raise a good point if building a rich GUI for the browser meant sacrificing HTML, as it does with e.g. GWT. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A well-designed Ajax GUI system gives you all the power of high-level UI components and all the power of low-level HTML/CSS/DOM primitives. Best of both worlds.
Most companies that I have seen adopt “Ajax” applications over the last decade have done so to replace client-server apps, minus the client installation and maintenance headaches. But it is a big bonus that their converted applications can benefit from all of the page-layout design sensibility and flexibility of HTML/CSS.
@Sebastian:
Nice work, wow! You guys are setting a very high bar for all the other Ajax frameworks…
I quite like it. It’s very impressive. That being said, I have never downloaded almost 1 MB of Javascript code before. The hierarchy looks good, and there’s no arguing that it functions well. The sortable table lags a bit, even with 100 records, but that’s not what I’m looking for. Nice job!
Hey , looks great. sure will give dojo a run for its money i guess, but like somebody has mentioned before, almost 1MB of js think how much of an overhead it will put on the web application. looks really realyl neat though
@Dan: You can build custom files for your application. This file than will contain both, your application code and the required qooxdoo classes. Both optimized and automatically arranged to be loaded in the correct order. Normally you don’t need all qooxdoo classes for a typical application. So the most time it’s not 1MB of qooxdoo code.
Very impressive Javascript deployment for a useless imitation of the desktop.
Faking the desktop will only lead to user disapointment because it’s slow (especially in IE) and it won’t behave exactly as it is supposed to.
Ever since I found qooxdoo a year ago, it has been my library of choice for developing UIs. Its not meant to be a visual enhancement for your website like scriptaculous or dojo. Its meant to be used strictly for application development (where being indexed by google is not important or desired). I’ve been playing with this new version since it came out, and it may be somewhat large, but the responsiveness of the UI’s it outputs is truly fast and at the same time beautiful (which makes the slight wait worth it).
why was my comment deleted? It was posted yesterday and is now gone today.
Agree 100%,Charlie Hubbard,join discussion at http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/08/17/703557.aspx ,I feel so lonely in my opinion.
Charlie Hubbard,do you have blog?I want to stay in touch with people like you.I’m corporate asp.net/atlas/winfx developer and I believe in potential of XAML/WPF(and more in LINQ than entity framework:-) but I see shortcomings of current implementation which tries to mimic desktop development model-flawed approach IMHO.
Best wishes.
Sulu: Sorry if you had a legit comment deleted. You’ve probably noticed that we’re deluged with spam — if a legit commit is deleted, it’s probably because we reviewed it and thought it was spam. Our automated spam solution catches the egregious stuff, but sadly, we review by hand a great many of the comments. We may eventually resolve this by requiring folks to log in to leave comments but… I’d hate to do that.
“It’s interesting to see such a fat client like UI in the web browser, but I think fat client, or really the rebirth of client server UI’s, in web browsers is really a mistake. HTML is so much more free and dynamic than cookie cutter UIs of the desktop world.”
HTML+CSS+IE = DEATH
Not everybody loves to enjoy the millions of bugs of browsers, especially IE6+, which turns web development almost impossible with its ugly, terrible, disgusting workarounds. So I think it’s not a surprise that some people try to use something usable.