

Ask HN: WHy no talk of Qooxdoo? - EasyCompany

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?<p>Any thoughts, thanks!
======
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!

------
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

~~~
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.

------
nailer
Link to demo: <http://demo.qooxdoo.org/current/showcase>

