One of the most comprehensive JavaScript frameworks is finally available in version 1.0. qooxdoo is a mature and popular solution for creating desktop-style web applications. It has a successful track record after almost five years of development that includes a number of important milestone releases. Backed by 1&1, the world's largest web host, the professional development team and an active open source community established a framework that is feature-rich, well-tested and fast.

The brand new Showcase application provides a perfect introduction to qooxdoo 1.0 as it highlights many of its GUI features: advanced widgets like virtual tables or trees, an advanced data binding layer, full internationalization support, a brand new html editing component and custom theming:

qooxdoo Showcase

Developers can fully concentrate on creating their apps by leveraging object-oriented JavaScript in a very elegant, yet familiar way. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is required. qooxdoo applications run in all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome) without any difficulty with cross-platform issues. To get an idea of what it's like to work with typical qooxdoo code, an interactive Playground lets you experiment with various live demos.

There is much more offered in qooxdoo, however, than just a large set of widgets, powerful layout managers and virtually unlimited theming capabilities. As a full-fledged application framework, it comes with an integrated, platform-independent tool chain that covers the entire range of app development and deployment - code validation, JS compiling and linking, compression and optimization, just to name a few. Other built-in tools allow for easy unit testing, automated GUI testing, searchable API reference, or cross-browser debugging a la Firebug. Mastering large-scale JavaScript applications is greatly facilitated by build process features such as automatically combined images ("sprites") or transparently breaking up an app into various parts that are loaded on-demand.

Feature set, design and quality of qooxdoo also make it a popular foundation for other frameworks. If you are interested in Java-based programming models that use qooxdoo internally, you may want to check out the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) or the new QxWT project, which integrates qooxdoo 1.0 with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), and has been officially released today as well.

For more information about qooxdoo 1.0 please see the detailed release notes. See the online demos for qooxdoo in action. Download the qooxdoo SDK, get started and have fun creating desktop-style apps for all browsers and platforms.

Thanks to all the people involved, the core team, fellow committers and contributors, testers, users, partners and 1&1 for their fantastic job and great support!