That’s right. Today we can all celebrate qooxdoo’s 5th anniversary.

While it is hard to exactly determine the actual start of a project like qooxdoo, January 27th, 2005 was the day the project was registered at SourceForge, the world’s largest OSS development web site. This first official appearance certainly qualifies as the “birthday” of qooxdoo.

As a true open source project qooxdoo used public code repositories right from the start. Everyone that followed the progress of the framework over time, either in a passive or active role, saw some very remarkable steps: after the first official release in early 2005 there have been a total of 27 stable releases of qooxdoo, including some ground-breaking and really innovative packages.

When talking about 2005, it is interesting to note that qooxdoo started a month before the term “AJAX” was even coined. While nobody could really foresee all the hype about Ajax, there was already a clear understanding of the potential if not power of JavaScript and modern, cross-browser applications. And a need for qooxdoo as an advanced application framework to make that vision a reality.

It is our pleasure to thank all the people that kept believing in this vision and made it such a fascinating reality! The support by 1&1 as the initiator and maintainer of the framework is indispensable, employing us as a team of full-time core developers. Working with fellow committers and a large number of contributors is a great every-day experience and always a source of inspiration. You really help making this an outstanding JavaScript framework. Last but not least many thanks to all of you who create impressive applications with it, but don’t forget to let us know about weak points to address, and also to tell others about the strong points and the fun in working with qooxdoo.

Lets make it another 5 years of innovation, success and fun of developing and using qooxdoo!