28 October 2006

GUI Toolkits - qooxdoo

No, I haven't lost all typing skills, it is really called qooxdoo.

qooxdoo (see also Wikipedia) is an AJAX targetted Javascript user interface toolkit. It is surprisingly fully featured and shows how far along web-based toolkits have come. Well, when I say surprising, I mean shocking.

The toolkit is LGPL licensed and has a large set of widgets available. I think the best way to describe it is to send you to the demo page here and I would recommend you look at this example in particular. There is no point in looking at the screenshots as playing round with the demos demonstrates its depth of features and how polished they are.

The advantages of this kit for web development include the abstraction away of web browser specifics and automatic browser detection. It has things that are normally only seen in fully fledged desktop environments like drag-n-drop support. Like I said earlier though I think the demos speak for themselves.