# About

qooxdoo is one of the most comprehensive and innovative Open Source Ajax frameworks. It is a multipurpose framework that includes support for professional JavaScript development, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and high-level client-server communication.

Please make sure you understand the license of qooxdoo and the rights and obligations that come with it.

## Framework

qooxdoo is entirely class-based and tries to leverage the features of object-oriented JavaScript. It is fully based on namespaces and does not extend native JavaScript types to allow for easy integration with other libraries and existing user code. Most modern browsers are supported (e.g. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, WebKit/Safari) and it is free of memory leaks. It comes with a comprehensive API reference, that is auto-generated from Javadoc-like comments and from the syntax tree representing the code. The fast and complete JavaScript parser not only allows doc generation, but is an integral part of the automatic build process that makes optimizing, compressing, linking and deployment of custom applications very user-friendly. Internationalization and localization of applications for various countries and languages is a core feature and easy to use. More info ...

## GUI Toolkit

Despite being a pure JavaScript framework, qooxdoo is quite on par with GUI toolkits like Qt or SWT when it comes to advanced yet easy to implement user interfaces. It offers a full-blown set of widgets that are hardly distinguishable from elements of native desktop applications. Full built-in support for keyboard navigation, focus and tab handling and drag & drop is provided. Dimensions can be specified as static, auto-sizing, stretching, percentage, weighted flex or min/max or even as combinations of those. All widgets are based on powerful and flexible layout managers which are a key to many of the advanced layout capabilities. Interface description is done programmatically in JavaScript for maximum performance.

No HTML has to be used and augmented to define the interface. The qooxdoo user does not even have to know CSS to style the interface. Clean and easy-to-configure themes for appearance, colors, borders, fonts and icons allow for a full-fledged styling that even supports runtime switching.

## AJAX

While being a client-side and server-agnostic solution, the qooxdoo project does include complete implementations of RPC servers (currently Java, PHP, Perl) to demonstrate some of its advanced client-server communcation. An abstract transport layer supports queues, timeouts and implementations via XMLHttpRequest, Iframes and Scripts. Like the rest of qooxdoo it fully supports event-based programming which greatly simplifies asynchronous communication.