Preface

Rich Internet Application (RIA) provides the capability to deliver feature-rich web applications, enables you to develop web applications with most of the desktop application's characteristics, and improves the usability of the web application. Over the last few years, many frameworks have arrived and are available to develop the Rich Internet Applications in different technologies.

qooxdoo is one of the comprehensive open source RIA frameworks. qooxdoo allows you to develop cross-browser RIAs in object-oriented JavaScript, which helps greatly to re-use application code, and hence reduces the application size. It provides a wide range of off-the-shelf UI widgets. qooxdoo comes with a rich feature set when compared to most of the other RIA frameworks. qooxdoo is completely based on JavaScript. It provides a variety of tools to build, optimize, generate documentation, and more. qooxdoo framework supports multiple browsers, multi-language deployment, custom look and feel, unit testing, automation testing, and much more.

In the past few years, all the major Internet applications or enterprise applications have been developed or migrated to RIA to support all the features that are provided in the desktop applications. This helps the organizations to keep the customers happy and also improves application deployment and maintenance.

qooxdoo is an open source framework. It has been there since 2005 and it is a quite stable framework now. If you are watching and waiting for the right time to migrate your application to qooxdoo, this is the right time, in my opinion.