1&1 Internet AG is both the world’s biggest web hosting company, and the fastest growing. Back in 2004 it initiated the development of a ground-breaking new JavaScript framework, that should later become “qooxdoo”. 1&1 has always been an active supporter of Open Source Software, so qooxdoo was registered as an LGPL-licensed project (later extended to an LGPL/EPL dual-license) at SourceForge in 01/2005, a month before the term "AJAX" was even coined.

1&1 continues to be the driving force of the project’s development, providing the technical infrastructure and also employing most of the core developers that are able to concentrate full-time on improving this enterprise-level AJAX framework.

United Internet, the public parent company of 1&1, was founded in 1988. Together with its branches, the Group offers the largest global web hosting service. The United Internet Group (listed on the stock exchange: ISIN DE0005089031) has over 3,500 employees at locations in America, Europe and Asia. United Internet’s high speed data centers manage more than 10 million domains. The Group’s data centers set extremely high standards worldwide with 40,000 hosted servers and a monthly transfer volume of 4,000 terabytes as well as over 5 billion e-mails.

There is an increasing number of cooperation partners involved, who bring in their know-how and resources to make this open source project even more mature and advanced.

STZ-IDA is a transfer orientated center within the Steinbeis Network. It joined forces in developing a common AJAX framework at an early stage, which lead to qooxdoo 0.6 including contributions like virtual table widget and API viewer.

Another exciting cooperation is with EclipseSource (formerly Innoopract), a strategic member of the Eclipse foundation, who builds and establishes the RAP platform for enterprise Ajax applications.

It is impossible to list all the various cooperation partners, that are directly or indirectly involved in the project. Many of those companies chose to base their applications, products or tools on the innovative qooxdoo framework. Just to name a few, this partner network includes international companies and technology leaders such as Borland/Codegear (Delphi For PHP), Adobe (JSEclipse), Web.de (SmartDrive) and GMX (Free webmail).

A huge advantage of qooxdoo, while being a true open source project, is that some of the main people behind the project do not have to work on it just part-time or only in their spare time. Instead, the following 1&1 employees work full-time (and full-steam) on qooxdoo’s advancement, both in technical and organizational terms (picture not quite up-to-date):

(Front row, left to right) Fabian, Sebastian (contributor), Andreas
(Back row, left to right) Martin, Johnny, Thomas, Alex
Missing: Christian and Daniel joined the core team in the meantime

• Andreas Ecker (ecker)
  Project lead and Co-creator.
  

  It was back in 1994 that I instantly fell in love with a fantastic new medium called the "World Wide Web" and a browser by the name of "XMosaic". Ever since that time I have been enjoying to leverage all those fancy web technologies. After my studies at the University of Karlsruhe/Germany and Oregon State University I've had several internet-related job positions since 1995. Survived some promising start-ups and finally the dot-com bubble burst, but never stopped programming and believing in JavaScript. Joined 1&1 in 2004, co-created "qooxdoo" in early 2005 as an innovative open source framework. The future of advanced browser-based applications has just begun, and I'm excited to be working at the very forefront of web technologies.

• Fabian Jakobs (fjakobs) [Blog] [Twitter] [LinkedIn] [Xing]
  Framework architect.

  I first learned about qooxdoo while evaluating AJAX frameworks during my Diploma thesis in 2006. It came much to a surprise for us that the, at that time, little known framework turned out to exactly match our evaluation criteria. Fascinated by the potential of rich JavaScript based web applications I joined the qooxdoo team as a core developer. My recent work involved the design and implementation of the new widget and layout system in qooxdoo 0.8.
  Off the computer I enjoy playing volleyball. I prefer beach volleyball, but since the weather in Karlsruhe doesn't allow playing it in the winter I play indoors as well.

• Alex Back (aback)
  Core developer. Contact person providing technical support to the community and internal/external partners.
  

  Before joining 1&1 (back in 2005) I've completed my Diploma in Business Informatics and worked for a smaller firm that developed their own CMS. Developing both server-side and client-side I always felt myself a little more comfortable at the client-side of life ;-)
  Shortly after I joined 1&1 qooxdoo was created, so I can claim for myself to be part of this very cool project right from its beginning. Huzzah!
  Along with the work on qooxdoo I deepened my knowledge in JavaScript (never really developed the OO-way with JavaScript before) and especially the differences between browsers (when developing a rich-text editing component you really can't avoid it).
  Besides sitting in front of a computer I appreciate reading interesting books in combination with a tasteful glass of wine.

• Thomas Herchenröder (thron7)
  Core developer.
  

  I had a bit of a journey, from applied maths to GUIs to Unix/C development, to network services and security, to Web development, with a stint into knowledge representation and natural language processing. I was always very interested in programming languages, with a special love for dynamic ones, so Javascript and Python are perfect matches. Add regexps, state systems, functional and concurrent programming to the mix. Currently, a natural addition is parsing and compilers, since I focus on qooxdoo's generator and tool chain, and domain-specific languages for the config files.

• Jonathan Weiß (nee Rass) (jonathan_rass) [Blog] [LinkedIn] [Xing]
  Core developer.
  

  I am a 25 year old IT application specialist, who has always been fascinated by programming. In 1998 I got in touch with the Internet at my first job at a start-up company. Since then I focused on web technologies, particularly on developing web applications with open source technologies.
  While working on an API for a Business Intelligence company I discovered what I like the most: creating a solid foundation for other developers to build diversified applications. So I joined 1&1 to combine my interest in the web with my passion for a development foundation by working on qooxdoo.

• Christian Schmidt (chris_schmidt)
  Core developer.

  Before I started my studies in computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Karlsruhe/Germany, I finished a professional education in a small IT company. In September 2008 I finished my Diploma thesis about using Flash for a charting solution of the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform. During that time I learned a lot about qooxdoo, RAP and Flash.
  I was very happy to join the qooxdoo team after my thesis, because qooxdoo is such a cool framework. :-)

• Daniel Wagner (d_wagner)
  Core developer.

  Ever since I first got on the Internet back in 1996, I knew I wanted to work in this rapidly evolving environment. After graduating from the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences with a diploma in Information Management, I spent five years doing mostly HTML/CSS and XSL work with a dash of web design for a small startup company. I barely scratched the surface of object oriented Javascript development during that time so I'm very excited about the opportunity to expand my knowledge while working on the qooxdoo framework.
  In my spare time I enjoy reading, playing video games and following (almost) every kind of motor racing there is.

• Martin Wittemann (martinwittemann) [Twitter]
  Core developer.
  

  I came to the qooxdoo team for my Bachelor thesis (developing the qooxdoo Inspector debugging tool) in 2007. That's where I got the first deeper insight into JavaScript and I really liked it, so I decided to work during my studies for the Masters degree again with my favorite language. This continues with writing my Master thesis about data binding in the qooxdoo team. My thesis ended in spring 2009 and since then I am a full member of the qooxdoo team.

The following developers play an important role in qooxdoo’s progress by both contributing and maintaining very exciting and substantial features. They also take a special interest in discussing the framework’s technical directions and are an invaluable source of know-how and expertise.

• Sebastian Werner (wpbasti) [LinkedIn]
  Former framework architect and co-creator of qooxdoo, now at a new job outside the core team. For some time and still the biggest contributor to the project with more than 6000 commits. Continues to follow the project and tries to give comments on architectural discussion as time allows.
• Derrell Lipman (derrell)
  PHP RPC backend, Table extensions, (virtual) Tree, and more
• Andreas Junghans (lucidcake)
  RPC mechanism, Java RPC backend, core framework features, and more
• Michael Hartmeier (mlhartme)
  qooxdoo Web Toolkit (QWT)
• Til Schneider (til132)
  API viewer, Table main contribution, Logging, and more

• Yücel Beser (ybeser)
  Playground, Toolbox
• Nick Glenncross
  Perl RPC backend
• Alessandro Sala (asala)
  Build process, JavaScript parsing and optimizing
• David Perez (david-perez)
  Date chooser, internationalization, and more
• Dietrich Streifert (level420)
  Date chooser, XML, and more

And many others. See the list of committers for both code repositories qooxdoo and qooxdoo-contrib.