It is very easy to use contributions in your application. For instance, using a widget from qooxdoo-contrib should almost be as easy and transparent as using any other widget that came with the framework itself.

Of course, before actually using the contrib in your code, the build process for your application needs to know where to get this contribution from. The configuration for including such a contribution changed after qooxdoo 0.7.x, so here is the legacy info:

The Makefile variable APPLICATION_INCLUDES tells the build system where to look for additional qooxdoo code. There are currently two ways to include code from qooxdoo-contrib into your own applications:

If you have a local SVN checkout of qooxdoo-contrib or an unzipped version of the downloaded contribution archive, you can point directly to the local directory containing the contribution you want to use. Suppose $(QOOXDOO_CONTRIB_PATH) points to the directory of your local qooxdoo-contrib checkout, then the following line will include version 0.1 of the ProgressBar:

APPLICATION_INCLUDES = $(QOOXDOO_CONTRIB_PATH)/ProgressBar/0.1

If you do not want to checkout qooxdoo-contrib, you may use a special URL scheme for the contribution in order to tell the build system to automatically download the needed contribution:

APPLICATION_INCLUDES = contrib://ProgressBar/0.1

The downloaded contribution will be put into a central cache directory inside the framework directory. Each time make build or make source is called the build system will check if the most recent version of each contribution is installed, and will update them if required.