This release introduces a completely redesigned native property system, bringing Qooxdoo closer to modern JavaScript semantics while preserving the robustness developers rely on. Properties can now be accessed and assigned directly, immutability rules are more expressive, and the new Property Registry opens the door to advanced tooling and introspection. Even qx.data.Array gains experimental native indexing support, making everyday development feel more natural.

Beyond the property system, Qooxdoo 8.0 modernizes the entire developer experience. The CLI has been rebuilt from the ground up with a clean, extensible architecture. The framework now fully supports ESLint 9 and its new flat configuration format, ensuring compatibility with the latest tooling. We’ve also aligned the compiler with Node.js 20+, embracing the current JavaScript ecosystem and its performance improvements.

Another major step forward is the significantly reduced package size. By switching to the native Intl API for locale handling, we were able to remove the large CLDR XML data that previously shipped with the framework. The result: faster installs, smaller footprints, and a cleaner architecture.

To make the transition as smooth as possible, Qooxdoo 8.0 includes a powerful automatic migration tool. It updates manifests, dependencies, and deprecated patterns, and provides clear guidance for any manual adjustments that may still be needed. Upgrading has never been easier.

You can find the release on npm here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@qooxdoo/framework/v/8.0.0-beta.1

Qooxdoo 8.0 is still in beta, but it already lays a strong foundation for the future of the framework — modern, lean, and ready for the next generation of applications.

Introducing Qooxdoo 8.0 (Beta): A Major Step Forward for the Framework was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The qooxdoo 7.1 release adds support for adding npm packages directly into your qx application and fixes a few bugs along the way.

Qooxdoo provides all the tooling and library functions necessary to develop full-fledged single-page web applications. Nevertheless, there are literally thousands of extension libraries via npm, many of these packages are not node specific and work just fine in the browser.

The 7.1 release adds functionality to the compiler which detects calls to require and grabs the selected packages from your node_modules folder and integrates them into your qooxdoo application.

The compiler creates a bundle containing the required packages including all dependencies, and adds that bundle to the JavaScript code that implements your app.

Using an npm package becomes as simple as installing

$ npm install semver

and then requiering the package in your qooxdoo app

const semver = require(‘semver’)
semver.valid(‘1.2.3’) // ‘1.2.3’
semver.valid(‘a.b.c’) // null
semver.clean(‘ =v1.2.3 ‘) // ‘1.2.3’

Enjoy!

Qooxdoo 7.1 – easy integration of npm packages was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The full service JavaScript application framework

After one year of development, the qooxdoo association is proud to announce the immediate availability of the major new qooxdoo 7.0 release.

While many offerings in the NPM universe focus on a single aspect of coding, packaging, delivering, designing or organizing a JavaScript web application, qooxdoo provides a one-stop solution for writing complete applications running in the browser, on mobiles, and on the server.

The new qooxdoo 7 release further aligns the framework with current JavaScript best practices. The JavaScript-native qooxdoo compiler, introduced with the qx6 release, is now fully integrated into the core qooxdoo framework. The classic python based qooxdoo generator, deprecated in qooxdoo 6, has been removed from the framework.

As the new compiler has full support for all the latest JavaScript features, the qooxdoo framework itself is also being transitioned to using modern JavaScript features. This has no effect on our APIs, but it makes the framework source code more readable and faster in situations where new language features provide the basis for simpler implementations of core features.

The framework source code has been fully reformatted with prettier, introducing a number of ES6 syntax features. We have also integrated code reformatting with prettier into the qooxdoo compiler. Try the new es6ify feature on your own projects.

Calling methods or static functions from a qooxdoo parent class has now become much simpler using the super keyword. It can be used to call the super class constructor as well as methods from the super class. Note that the qooxdoo super is slightly more user-friendly than the regular ES6 super, as you can access this even before calling super.

Many qooxdoo components were enhanced to support the WAI-ARIA recommendations for making rich Internet applications accessible, leading to much improved keyboard control in qooxdoo applications.

The qooxdoo communication classes under qx.io have been restructured. Everything under qx.io.remote has been removed from the standard framework and is now available as a deprecated add-on. A new production quality JSON-RPC implementation is available under qx.io.jsonrpc. We have also added an experimental GraphQL client (qx.io.graphql.Client). Let us know what you think.

When migrating your applications to this major release, please note that there are a number of breaking changes (hence the new major version number). Details are in the release notes.

Getting started with qooxdoo 7 is as simple as ever:

$ mkdir myapp
$ cd myapp
$ npm init
$ npm install --save-dev @qooxdoo/framework
$ npx qx create myapp --type desktop --noninteractive --out=.
$ npx qx serve

Now connect with your browser to http://localhost:8080 and give your first qooxdoo application a whirl. The source code is in the source/class folder. The compiler will automatically recompile the app as soon as you change a file. Hit reload in the browser to see the effects of your changes.

Learn more about writing beautiful full page web applications with qooxdoo on our website: www.qooxdoo.org.

Qooxdoo 7.0 was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Qooxdoo 6.0 — The JavaScript framework for people who love coding

Writing a complete web application, in JavaScript, without ever touching HTML or CSS, using class-based object orientation going far beyond what even ES7 has to offer, while still writing unadulterated JavaScript. Sounds fantastical? Just wait! We also throw in a compiler to optimize your code, a testing framework, superb theming, a rich widget set, and full support for multilingual applications. All this comes as an easy to install npm package with an MIT license.

Later on in this story we will show you how to get your first Qooxdoo app up and running on no time. So before you read-on, let’s start the installation¹ of the Qooxdoo compiler.

$ mkdir myqxapp
$ cd myqxapp
$ npm init
$ npm install --save-dev @qooxdoo/framework

But let’s start at the beginning

Over 15 years ago, some visionary developers at the German ISP 1&1 created a JavaScript framework for writing full page web applications. This was the heyday of Internet Explorer 6, with web developers breaking down in crying fits over all the things they could not do because their pages also had to support that web browser.

The new Qooxdoo framework did incredible things: it allowed for writing beautiful-looking web applications that rivaled desktop applications in their usability. The name of the new framework was chosen to be “Qooxdoo” because in German the phrase “Kuckst du!” roughly translates to “Careful or your eyes might pop out in amazement!”

Qooxdoo not only looked beautiful on the outside but also on the inside. The whole framework was extremely well-designed, copying many advanced programming concepts from the Qt GUI library as well as from Java to provide an optimal environment for writing large, industrial-strength web applications.

The best thing about Qooxdoo for the Open Source world was that 1&1 published the framework under an open source license and made it available for free. Unfortunately, despite its great features, the new framework did not take the world by storm. This was probably because writing a web application in pure JavaScript was not something that sounded very appealing to the average web developer who was more into HTML and CSS and only accepted JavaScript as a necessary evil rather than seeing the beauty of it.

After the release of Qooxdoo 5.0 in 2015, the interest in the technology started to fade at 1&1 and the company decided to turn the project over to the Qooxdoo Association, a motivated group of professional software developers who were using Qooxdoo in their own applications and were highly interested in the continued development and availability of the technology.

The Qooxdoo Association at work

The first big post-1&1 addition to Qooxdoo came from John Spackman who donated an all new, super fast Qooxdoo compiler running on node.js. Over the years, the compiler was enhanced to finally become the qx tool which today sits at the heart of Qooxdoo 6.

If you executed the npm command further up in this article, you should now have a copy of the Qooxdoo compiler installed in your qxmyapp folder. You are only seconds away from your first Qooxdoo app.

$ cd ~/qxmyapp
$ npx qx create myapp --type desktop --noninteractive --out=.
$ npx qx serve

The qx tool also lets you add extra packages to your application providing additional functionality. The package browser shows you which packages are available.

There is also extensive documentation, an interactive API viewer, and a demo browser and widget browser showing the various widgets in action. If you want to try your hand at a little coding there is even a playground app for tinkering with Qooxdoo directly in your browser.

Whats new in Qooxdoo 6.0.0

If you were previously exposed to Qooxdoo, you might wonder what actually changed in the framework since the release of version 5.

First the good news. All the Qooxdoo developers run large applications of their own with Qooxdoo and are thus very careful to not break their own applications with changes to the framework. Most applications written for Qooxdoo 5 will work without change on Qooxdoo 6. See the release notes for the short list of incompatible changes.

While Qooxdoo 6 still works with the classic Qooxdoo generator, we urge you to use the opportunity to switch over to the new Qooxdoo compiler, as the forthcoming Qooxdoo 7 will not support the old generator anymore.

Not only does the new compiler run much faster, it also lets you use all the latest JavaScript language extensions. Even better, thanks to the integrated Babel support, the compiler can down-compile your modern JavaScript to run on older browsers which do not have ES6 support, for example.

Here is an incomplete list of all the new things that appeared in Qooxdoo since the release of Qooxdoo 5:

• All of Qooxdoo now comes with an MIT license.
• A GitHub-based Qooxdoo package system allowing everyone to provide their own Qooxdoo extension packages by simply tagging their GitHub repos appropriately.
• Greatly simplified memory management taking advantage of the better garbage collection abilities of modern JavaScript engines.
• A new official Qooxdoo theme called Tangible, inspired by Google’s Material design guidelines.
• A new command line test engine called TestTAPper which can run your test suite using Playwrite, ideal for adding automated testing of your Qooxdoo application in your CI/CD process.
• Better support for web fonts and font icons.
• Support for Promises and the new async keyword in ES6.
• An ID mechanism, allowing identifying DOM elements when using external tools for E2E front-end testing.
• Many new extension packages with additional widgets and themes.

Although Qooxdoo 6.0.0 is a very new release, it’s stable because the core developers as well as many others have been using the master branch of the framework over the last 6 years in their production applications.

All code is available on GitHub, where we have published policies and rules on contributing, and we actively encourage anyone to submit Pull Requests to contribute to the project. We chat in public on Gitter and answer questions on StackOverflow. Visit our new website featuring our portfolio of real world examples and links to the live Qooxdoo applications and to documentation.

And we have exciting plans for the future!

[1] These instructions assume you have node already up and running on your account. Otherwise, have a look at NVM, which is a very convenient way to install and mange Node.js installations.

Qooxdoo 6.0 — The JavaScript framework for people who love coding was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Have you been wondering what's happening in qooxdoo land, and if there will ever be a version 6 release? I can tell you now, there will! Just as it is with most projects, they often take a little longer than expected. We are mostly done with the coding, but the documentation and website still need some more attention before we are ready to make a splash. In any event, you can try the new qooxdoo now.

We have been paying close attention to not break code that worked on qooxdoo 5.0, so you should be fine with upgrading your existing application to the new qooxdoo release. The compiler is now written in JavaScript and can be installed via npm. We have a great new contrib system and some cool new toys, like an event recorder and a modern looking theme. More on these later.

For starters, try setting up the compiler and creating a little demo app. Behold the npm installation awesomeness:

$ mkdir qxdemo 
$ cd qxdemo/ 
$ npm i @qooxdoo/compiler @qooxdoo/framework
$ npx qx create qxdemo --out . --type desktop --noninteractive
$ npx qx serve

After running the above, navigate your browser to http://localhost:8080

Alternatively, if you don’t mind answering a bunch of interactive questions, you can get away with even less typing:

$ npm i -g @qooxdoo/compiler @qooxdoo/framework
$ qx create qxdemo
$ cd qxdemo
$ qx serve

If you feel like helping, see us on gitter!

Update 2019–05–14: new package names in the @qooxdoo namespace.

The Future Qooxdoo was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fixes

Google Chrome

• Fixed an issue with non reacting menubar buttons starting with Chrome 55 (#9182)

Microsoft Edge

• Fixed focus event normalization handling (#9174)

Firefox

• Fixed gecko engine detection for Firefox 47beta+ (#8984)
• Removed padding-box which is not supported anymore in gecko (#9189)

Misc

• Added EL Capitan “10.11” and Sierra “10.12” to the OS detection (#9185)
• Fixed testrunner on MacOS Safari (#9028)
• Fixed SVGElement bound rect handling (#195)
• Restrict the rule to the top mobile app element and its children (#202)

There are many more changes in store, already implemented and used in production by some of the developers. So if you are yearning for new stuff, have a look at our git repo.

Get your copy of 5.0.2 from https://github.com/qooxdoo/qooxdoo/releases/tag/release_5_0_2

2017–01–10

Qooxdoo 5.0.2 released was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A teammate from Webmeisterei uses qooxdoo for an internal tool, he pointed me to the tutorials. For my first application I have chosen the qooxdoo desktop.

Qooxdoo comes with a lot of documentation. My favorites are the qooxdoo manual the Demobrowser and the API Viewer.

With the help of the well written tutorial and the object orientation introduction I got a quick overview of qooxdoos functionality and which impressed me quite a lot.

Soon after completing that tutorial I found the qooxdoo gitter chat where people where very helpful and friendly. Within a week I was able to create QxJoint.

I have already started work on my second qooxdoo project: QxPromise.

Things I don’t like about qooxdoo:

• there is no integration in the js ecosystem
• hard coded paths in config.json
• hard to integrate contributions

What I love about qooxdoo:

• object orientation
• optimized dependencies with the help of generator.py
• great library design

My favorite feature of the Demobrowser: The “JS Code” button in the tool bar. Note that if you are working on a small screen, the button may be hidden behind the “next page” button in the top right hand corner.

I hope you guys have as much fun with the framework as I do.

How I learned Qooxdoo in two Weeks was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Por algún tiempo no han habido noticias de que ha estado pasando con qooxdoo, pero si das un vistazo a nuestro repositorio en github notarás que ha estado repleto de vida. He aquí algunos eventos recientes:

• En 2015 1&1 Internet Inc, la compañía que estuvo desarrollando qooxdoo desde el 2006, ha cambiado su estrategia sobre herramientas y ha dejado de invertir en el desarrollo ulterior de qooxdoo.
• Se ha fundado la asociación qooxdoo.org con el objetivo de guiar y organizar el futuro desarrollo de qooxdoo. Todos los contribuidores principales fuera de 1&1 se han unido a la nueva asociación.
• 1&1 ha pasado el control del dominio qooxdoo.org a la asociación qooxdoo.org.
• 1&1 ha relicenciado a MIT todo el código y documentación que ellos contribuyeron a qooxdoo.
• Todos los repositorios han pasado a una infraestructura pública.

Desde principios de 2016 la comunidad interesada en qooxdoo se ha mantenido en contacto por medio de gitter para acordar estrategias y organizar el trabajo. Todo al tiempo que hemos estado atendiendo peticiones de combinación (pull request) con corrección de errores y nuevas características.

Estamos trabajando en varios proyectos, algunos de ellos ya se han combinado, otros aun permanecen como peticiones, y otros están en repositorios aparte. Esperamos ver artículos individuales sobre algunos de estos desarrollos en el curso de las próximas semanas:

• Pruebas automáticas y reportes de cobertura vía Travis CI y Coveralls.
• Un nuevo, estupendo y rápido compilador para qooxdoo escrito en JavaScript.
• Soporte de íconos por fuente (font icons) para qx.ui.basic.Image.
• Un editor visual de temas.
• Un nuevo tema por defecto inspirado en Material Design.
• Un recolector de basura mucho más simple.
• Soporte para promesas (promises).
• Soporte para anotaciones estilo Java.

Actualmente estamos preparando un lanzamiento con corrección de errores que estará disponible en las próximas semanas.

Suscribite a las publicaciones de qooxdoo para mantenerte al tanto.

Leé el artículo original en inglés.

Mientras tanto en el repositorio de qooxdoo… was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For quite some time there has been no news on what is up with qooxdoo. If you had a look at our github repository recently, you may have noticed though that there is plenty of life. Here are the recent developments:

• In 2015, 1&1 Internet Inc., the company who has been developing qooxdoo since 2006, has changed their tooling strategy and has stopped investing in further qooxdoo development.
• The qooxdoo.org association has been founded with the objective to guide and organize the further development of the qooxdoo framework. All major contributors outside of 1&1 have since joined the new association.
• 1&1 has signed a release to hand over control of the qooxdoo.org domain to the qooxdoo.org association.
• 1&1 has re-licensed all the code and documentation they contributed to qooxdoo under an MIT license.
• All repositories have been moved to a public infrastructure.

Since early 2016 the people interested in qooxdoo have been gathering on gitter to organize work and agree on strategy. All the while we have been busy merging pull requests both for bug fixes as well as for new features.

We are working on several projects, some of them have already been merged, some still exist as Pull Requests, and others are in separate repositories. Expect to see individual articles on some of these developments over the course of the next few weeks:

• automatic testing and coverage reporting via Travis CI and Coveralls.
• a blazingly fast new compiler for qooxdoo projects written in JavaScript.
• font icons support for qx.ui.basic.Image.
• a visual theme editor.
• a new Material Design inspired default theme.
• much simplified garbage collection.
• support for promises.
• support for Java-style annotations.

We are currently preparing a bug fix release due out in the next few weeks. Subscribe to qooxdoo news to stay up to date.

Meanwhile in the qooxdoo repository … was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For quite a while now we have been talking about the intention to open up the project to facilitate more community involvement. 1&1 as qooxdoo’s initiator has started and is supporting this transformation. As the opportunity is actively being pursued, we would like to announce where we stand right now.

In order to allow for a best possible transformation of the project, we wanted this to be driven by people who have been involved with the qooxdoo project for a long time, have been providing first-class contributions to it and have an expert knowledge of its technology. Ideally, they should have a track record of running Open Source projects successfully as well as knowing about the specific needs of a professional, business-oriented community such as qooxdoo’s. Knowing such people in person and trusting them wouldn’t hurt either.

We’re glad that the ones we approached — encompassing all of above requirements perfectly — agreed to take up the opportunity to evolve the qooxdoo project: long-time qooxdoo fellows Fritz Zaucker and Tobi Oetiker joined to coordinate and drive the upcoming changes and improvements.

Moreover, others we asked for their close collaboration are also on-board, e.g. Cajus Pollmeier, Derrell Lipman, Dietrich Streifert, John Spackman. Given the recent activities of various people on the mailing list there is much additional momentum.

Actually, we had hoped to announce both plan and completion of this entire process by the end of 2015. But a few administrative hurdles are still being worked on. With 1&1, a great supporter of Open Source and qooxdoo in particular, some necessary steps are being taken to ensure the organizational and legal aspects are properly addressed:

1) As previously announced the current dual-licensing (LGPL/EPL) will be simplified and future releases are expected to be under the MIT license.

2) We founded a legal entity called “qooxdoo.org” as a non-profit association after Swiss law (named a “Verein” in German).

3) 1&1 is going to transfer the intellectual property rights and the qooxdoo.org internet domain to the qooxdoo.org association.

4) The ownership of the qooxdoo organization at Github and thus the official code repository will also be transferred.

5) The qooxdoo hosting infrastructure (homepage, blog, bugzilla, etc.) is to be replaced, by public infrastructure and services such as GitHub, etc. wherever possible.

With the new freedom there will also be more responsibility for the community. While 1&1 developers might continue to contribute to qooxdoo as their job responsibilities permit, the driving force behind the project will be you, the experts and collaborators right within the community. qooxdoo will now depend on your contributions (ideas, code, infrastructure, money, etc) and benefit from your engagement.

We have seen a number of qooxdoo-based projects being discussed on the mailing list in the past. And we know of a few other projects using qooxdoo as key element that are not publicly visible. Let’s bundle our resources to make qooxdoo even better. As there are so many talented and enthusiastic qooxdoo users this transformation is going to succeed. The qooxdoo.org association will provide the vessel for this endeavour.

At this point we would like to thank 1&1 for the tremendous effort put into this framework over all those years, and moreover, for the generosity to make it available as an Open Source project since early 2005 and now allowing qooxdoo to be further evolved by a grown-up community.

We will let you know once the administrative steps are completed. In the meantime please feel free to send any of your comments/suggestions/pledges.

Cheers,

Andreas, Fritz, Tobi and supporters

Evolving the qooxdoo Project was originally published in Qooxdoo News on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.