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Ask HN: WHy no talk of Qooxdoo?

13 points by EasyCompany ↗ HN
I have been researching the various JavaScript frameworks to build desktop like web apps and i noticed that sproutcore and cappuccino are getting all the attention, yet qooxdoo looks amazing, even their level of support, community activity and documentation, am i missing something here? If i go with all the hype, then i would be learning sproutcore or cappuccino, maybe its just the these two latter frameworks have a more promising future?

Any thoughts, thanks!

10 comments

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mhd
Isn't Lord of Ultima[1] written with qooxdoo? That's quite impressive and certainly on par with something like 280 slides.

[1]: http://www.lordofultima.com

EasyCompany
That is truly impressive, i never knew that this was made with qooxdoo!!
mhd
Well, I heard someone mention that on twitter, and the javascript does contain the "qx" toplevel object. Don't know if it's heavily modified or not. Also, judging from the page names it's using ASP.NET. Considering that a lot of the usual web games (all those boring fighting sims) are a dreadful hodgepodge of PHP and Flash, this is quite refreshing.

Also, the gmx.com web mail service seems to be written in qooxdoo (and was probably the reason for writing the library in the first place). It's interesting to compare that to the rather dated original European GMX webapp (gmx.net), which seems to be lingering on in a barely modified Perl CGI incarnation.

EasyCompany
Just signed up for the gmx.com email account an dits is realy cool, stylish, you can also adjust themes. Design doesn't seem to be an issue here.
burel
maybe not the hard facts you asked for but here is my suggestion:

qooxdoo is made by germans and this is also how it 'feels':

- serious engineering work

- powerfull

- solid

- rather heavyweighted

- rather complex

so this is not a toy, just have a look at the real-life list:

http://qooxdoo.org/community/real_life_examples

So I'd say:

* QOOXDOO -- serious, enterprise windows-like desktop apps

* CAPPUCCINO -- stylish, graphic-centric, mac-like apps

EasyCompany
That is a very interesting and true take on the matter, i would say that most mac related creations are very stylish. Whats your thoughts on the sproutcore framework relative qooxdoo?
mhd
While I think those "German engineering" cliches are rather tired (and wrong, cf. Dieter Rams influence on Apple products), I don't see a big difference regarding complexity between Cappuccino and Qooxdoo regarding complexity. Both seem to embrace the desktop paradigm, both have an API that's close to traditional GUIs (very close in the case of Cappuccino).

(And it's not really that much easier getting graphics-intensive stuff done in Cappuccino, compared to something like Raphaël.)

Cappuccino just looks better by default. It shares this advantage with ext.js, compared to the e.g. Dijit (and qooxdoo). Whether that's actually worth that much is a good question, considering that any respectable outward-facing webapp is bound to have a style of their own and plenty of designers to make that happen. In that regard, I thin Cappuccino might be even more suited to intranet enterprise applications, where there's not that many designers around and having a default good look is definitely worth it (and having things look like a desktop app is actually an advantage).

In the end, the big difference is between the desktop way of doing things the more common jquery/dojo/YUI enhanced-web page style.

scrame
One very real reason is that it has a horrible name. If someone brought this up in a project planning meeting, most of the initial questions would revolve around how to spell it and what it meant, rather than what it does.

Project and product naming is very important, and one reason why something called "The GIMP" will never replace something called "Photoshop" in corporate environments even if they were the exact same program.

The reason no one talks about Qooxdoo is because no one knows how to pronounce it.

EasyCompany
lol.....i am still trying to figure it out, maybe its German humour!