jQuery vs Qooxdoo (WTF is Qooxdoo?)
jQuery, with jQuery UI and a few plugins - versus Qooxdoo as a whole; that's the topic.
I would love to hear other Web Developers thoughts that compare these two frameworks and how you may have successfully or unsuccessfully incorporated them into enterprise applications.
I'd consider myself a jQuery guy but only because that's I've been learning, following and paying attention to for quite some time now. Seems like everyone is too, not just me.
So, a client is interested in Qooxdoo for UI development, and at this point, I'm not so sure I can vouch for Qooxdoo with much confidence, considering:
1. Lack of overall community and following (compared to jQuery).
2. Adoption rate is low.
3. Commitment from their core development team (defects are slow to be fixed).
Not to mention the Qooxdoo road map doesn't seem to have much of a road, and of course Microsoft adopted jQuery as their #1 client/ajax framework as of 2008. So anything going forward will be worked into Visual Studio.
If anyone has enterprise experience in one or both of these technologies I'd love to hear about some valid comparisons, pros and cons of each in the comments.
Note, the keyword is enterprise, if you're building a simple website gallery for your uncle's pet rock collection then jQuery is for you, run away, have fun! Please comment only if you've actually used Qooxdoo to build your application.
Quite honestly I couldn't find much information about Qooxdoo online, so I'm soliciting!
Comments (6)
qooxdoo application? check real-world examples
Well, I tried jquery a while ago (2007) and chose qooxdoo at that time. My big concerns were: a) qooxdoo compiles the source code and optimizes that. b) it's more programming rather than setting up html tags; in fact you don't need to know html and the api is very well documented (check skeleton and instance docs) c) desktop like screen (with capability to choose iframe widget for a long scroll!) was a big plus for me d) rich widget set and aesthetic look and feel (themes)
I tried smartclient, jquery, qooxdoo (, very lightly dojo and yui) and extjs and evaluated all of them; then jumped on qooxdoo band. check my site: www.foxmemo.com for demo; it is real work (5+ MB qx source code) and has been successfully installed in few companies. The run time speed is good; except that it fails when called from ie8 (ie9 is ok) unless the processor is a powerful one: i5/i7. I'm sure you can find better examples under qooxdoo's real-life examples.
Regarding roadmap, low adoption, slow bug fix: I somewhat agree and disagree at the same time. I'd been using qooxdoo since 2007 and have seen qooxdoo grow from version 0.6. Bottom line is they are doing fantastic job. IMHO, their vision, effort and roadmap has the potential to win the JS-Framework game in future.
I would have commented to the
[Reposted by Mike, for Guest]
I would have commented to the proper post - the one about jQuery + UI stuff vs Qooxdoo, but there is no "add new comment" there. Possibly this is why others haven't commented there also.
Right now I'm on my second project with qooxdoo. I'm no jQuery expert, but whenever I had to touch something done with it I hated it - it's too much involvement with the markup, and I'm a programmer, not an HTML designer. I want to work with my app's object model, not with the DOM.
I suppose you could, in theory, build your own meta-framework on top of jQuery and jQuery UI stuff. But with qooxdoo available this would be sort of reinventing the wheel.
Maybe you should subscribe for a few weeks to the mailing list, and post your questions there. It's quite active, it's highly helpful, and people don't mind answering the same newbie questions time and again. It would also give you an idea of how active the project is, both for framework development and framework usage.
If you like tinkering with CSS and HTML, or your customer asks for it, then qooxdoo is not for you. Qooxdoo employs an own mechanism for separating visual aspect and functionality. This mechanis feels a lot like CSS, only it isn't. There are good technical reasons for this (they interpret a lot of what you configure in a theme in ways that provide features that plain CSS doesn't), and it feels quite nice to use for a programmer. Only, I have seen web developers which feel like a fish out of water when you take HTML and CSS away from them.
I have seen a few in-house built frameworks, developed mainly on top of jQuery, by larger companies, designed specifically for a particular backend - mostly also an in-house developed one. None has come even close to what you can easily do with qooxdoo. Also, I have done one larger project with ASP.Net for backend and one with a spring-based backend written in Java (still working on it - these two projects spanned the last three years of my professional life or so). It was a breeze integrating the respective backends with qooxdoo frontends. There was no need to develop a complex and dedicated integration solution - very much like what you can do with jQuery's Ajax. So I don't see any difference there. Only, if I had to build interfaces with lots of trees, tabs, panes, fields of all types, tables with autofiltering, autocompletion in several places, toolbars and menubars and dialogs etc. with jQuery, and be sure I don't have memory losses, I think I'd work maybe three to five times more for the same functionality without qooxdoo.
One more thing (probably important for you, if you inquire about enterprise apps): qooxdoo has excellent localization support. But you're not limited to its built-in localization support, you can plug your own, if needed.
Hope this helps.
Thank you, Qooxdoo still just Qoox's
Thanks for your in-depth reply.
I've moved your comment and made sure that comments could be accepted and still nothing.
The continued lack of comments, support, and Qooxdoo fan-persons leads me to believe that it just doesn't have much backing, and not many are even researching alternatives to jQuery at this time.
Again, I'm not a "programmer’s programmer", my expertise is with the presentation layer and XHTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery are my bread and butter for nearly 10 years.
I can see for a programmer, abstracting the HTML, CSS, Ajax and other presentation code away into a nice programmable framework, might be more comfortable for you.
I truly appreciate your insight, detail, and most importantly for your reply!
We've decided to stick with jQuery for now.
Thank goodness for QooxDoo
As a desktop programmer moving to the web I can't tell you how relieved I was to find QooxDoo.
What a mess web development is! HTML/CSS/JavaScript on the client side, PHP/SQL on the server side and often XML in the middle. It's like a bizarre parlour game: how many different ways can we fart around with plain text?
QooxDoo does a great job of tidying up the client side.
Fair enough...
True, it may do a good job of abstracting away all of the things you as a desktop programmer are unfamiliar with. But the truth is, for a web developer such as myself, I'm more comfortable working with my HTML/CSS/JavaScript up close and personal, where I can see it! :)
Thanks for the reply!
Perhaps there's a little more to qooxdoo than it seems
Like you I've mainly worked with jQuery I'm asking the same question. jQuery is absolutely great. However, the issue is that clearly jQuery + jQueryUI + whatever plugin is a little piecemeal to tackle more of a "desktop in a browser kind of application". So I started looking about for complements/alternatives.
I believe you may be misjudging qooxdoo community support and longevity expectations. First, I've generally observed that tools and libraries which are generally more oriented to webdesigners and website production tend to have greater site/blog/forum share. This is true of programming languages (see for e.g. PHP versus Python/Ruby) as well as serverside frameworks. Second, tools and libraries that are more oriented to producing RIA type of apps tend to get less web-exposure - I believe it is common place to say the reason is that the large majority of these kind of apps are deployed to intranets or to extranets.
Some interesting facts I found about qooxdoo:
1. qooxddo is one of the early players in the AJAX arena, since 2005 before the ajax term was coined! longevity does not equal quality however it speaks about it's "longevity expectations" in several forms, such as developer commitment and core community continuance.
2. Eclipse RAP - Rich Ajach Platform as adopted qooxdoo as it's toolkit for the browser side (don't know when this happened but it goes back at least to 2007).
This is very very impressive in my book.
3. My cursory evaluation leads me to think that only proprietary frameworks (or recently opened source ones) are even close to provide the qooxdoo level of integration.
For example ExtJS, smartclient, bindows,.. at first glance for license, longevity and general feel of open-sourceness, none really feel like alternatives to qooxdoo to me.
4. qooxdoo as some features inspired or similar to jQuery:
http://qooxdoo.org/documentation/general/from_jquery_to_qooxdoo
some interesting links:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/video-brief-on-the-qooxdoo-framework
http://www.eclipse.org/rap/demos/
This said I'm still shopping around. Looking for what tickles my fancy. I would love to capitalize on my jQuery knowledge. But perhaps qooxdoo will be it in the end. Good luck on your search.
Miguel Lopes