Here are answers to some frequently asked questions. Please also see the comprehensive documentation or contact the mailing list for more help.

It's like "cooks-do", as in the sentence "Cooks do cooking for their living". Actually, it's the literal transcription of some German slang meaning "Look at that!".

Yes. qooxdoo is Open Source, dual-licensed under LGPL/EPL, i.e. the "GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)" and the "Eclipse Public License (EPL)". As a recipient of qooxdoo, you may choose which license to receive the code under. More licensing info.

qooxdoo was initiated and is maintained by 1&1, the world’s biggest web hosting company. There is a team of full-time core developers as well as many committers and contributors.

Yes. Always has, always will. It is a true Open Source project: standard licensing, contributor-friendly, public code repositories, public bug tracking and roadmap planning.

No. It was registered as an Open Source project at SourceForge on January 2005, one month before the term "AJAX" was even coined. It is constantly being developed and improved, which makes it one of the most mature and innovative web application frameworks today.

Yes. Its solid programming model and tooling allows for creating large-scale applications. To get an idea, see GMX.com or other user-contributed examples.

Use the general mailing_lists. Many active users as well as the full-time core developers try to answer all your questions. There is no commercial support currently available, but there are several companies listening to the mailing list to offer qooxdoo-related contracting.

Yes. As of December 2011, there is "qooxdoo Beginner's Guide" by Raffi and Bachu, through Packt Publishing. It covers qooxdoo 1.4. Several other books contain sections on qooxdoo or references to it. Also, you can use the qooxdoo manual with its approx. 500 pages. It's available for free as an online HTML version and a PDF download.

A qooxdoo application runs in all major web browsers. Besides those desktop browsers, many popular mobile browsers are supported. In most JavaScript environments qooxdoo (or the parts of qooxdoo relevant for the specific environment) should also run fine.

No. If you already have an existing backend that serves HTTP (or HTTPS) requests, it's probably fine to continue using it. Optionally qooxdoo offers several RPC servers for an elegant client-server communication. BTW, during development of your client application the local file system often is sufficient, without the need to use a real server.

For many scenarios a solid knowledge of JavaScript would be sufficient. With object-oriented programming and a basic understanding of event-based application design, you are able to create mobile apps, rich internet applications or server-side apps. In those cases you typically would not need to know about HTML, CSS or DOM. But those fundamental web technologies would of course play a major role besides JavaScript when it comes to creating or enhancing dynamic websites, e.g. portals.

No. It is more comprehensive and covers a larger range of application scenarios. If you were thinking about jQuery or Prototype, then yes, qooxdoo could also be used as such a low-level JS library. But on-top of that it allows you to pick from a consistent set of more advanced features, e.g. data binding. For other application types (like mobile or RIA) qooxdoo is available as a "framework", not just a "library". As such it comes with a large set of high-quality widgets and features a powerful, platform-independent tool chain.

In terms of feature set, probably all of jQuery's functionality is also available in qooxdoo (as it is in most other JS libraries). The CSS selector engine is even identical. But there are many features available in qooxdoo that are beyond the scope of jQuery: for instance, how to organize and maintain more advanced applications in an object-oriented way, or how to leverage data binding and MVC.
In terms of programming, qooxdoo suggests a more explicit and comprehensible coding style, which is also nicely supported by a complementary developer toolchain. Nevertheless you might be interested in an optional jQuery-like API when working with collections of DOM elements in qooxdoo.

Only to some extent. There is no official GUI builder that comes with the framework. But there are some community-driven attempts to create such GUI builders. These contributions may have different objectives and may only work with legacy qooxdoo code, so YMMV. If you're interested, have a look at some of the following implementations: Tartan Blueprint or qooxit for some fairly recent attempts. jsQt for a Qt Designer based solution. Older attempts include Weida (browser-based, contributed), PyQooxCard (part of the QxTransformer project) or GUI RAD for qooxdoo. A commercial solution is Delphi for PHP from Borland/CodeGear (frontend largely qooxdoo-based). qooxdoo's built-in Inspector is a sophisticated debugging tool rather than a GUI builder, but it might help nonetheless as it allows to manipulate a running qooxdoo user interface.

Yes, several. Java-oriented are QxWT, which provides a qooxdoo wrapper for GWT, or the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). An XML-based UI description is featured by QxTransformer. A visual RAD solution is Delphi for PHP. See some more solutions.

The homepage is a Wiki, that allows you to easily modify its content. You are welcome to contribute. See here for more information.

Use bugzilla.

Absolutely. You are invited to become a fellow developer and contributor to the project. There is an infrastructure for contributions, which allows for easily setting up, developing, releasing a project and for collaborating on it.

Wanna meet people? Wanna connect to people via social networks? Presentation slides are also available. Subscribe to feeds. Enjoy some real-life examples from other qooxdoo users. Become a member of the Community!