qooxdoo is a comprehensive and innovative AJAX application framework. Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS or DOM knowledge is needed.

It includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is open source under an LGPL/EPL dual license.

While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved substantially.

GUI Toolkit
qooxdoo 0.8 features a complete rewrite of the GUI toolkit. It is state-of-the-art and supports all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). The GUI toolkit has a layered architecture: on-top of a low-level DOM-oriented layer (that might be used as a separate library), it includes a large set of widgets and layout managers (perfect for building Rich Internet Applications RIAs). Online demos are available.

Users can very easily implement additional custom widgets or layouts to fit their individual needs. Theming of widgets continues to be independent from the widget code itself, and now allows for virtually unlimited styling possibilities, e.g. rounded borders, gradients, shadows. While qooxdoo comes with two new attractive themes, it is also easy to create custom themes, without any CSS knowledge required.

Tool Chain
Besides the exciting changes in the GUI toolkit, the developer tool chain has also been improved to a large extend. It frees the developer from such tedious and complex tasks as compressing and optimizing the JS code, resolving dependencies between classes, using a JS linker to produce a custom build of the app ready for deployment. Some further highlights of the comprehensive, built-in tooling include: searchable API reference, internationalization, source code validation, unit testing, combined images, and much more. The entire tool chain is platform-independent: all that is needed is a working Python installation, which is trivial to setup on any operating system, including MS Windows.

While API documentation is quite complete already, wiki documentation is still being updated to account for all the changes and improvements. Download the qooxdoo 0.8 package, and see the included index.html to get started quickly.