> How come the user base is shrinking at a time when web based development &
> deployment is on the rise?  Building large scale web apps has always been
> Qooxdoo¹s great ability, a pretty fantastic achievement that¹s being
> squandered away.

I think here are two differen aspects at work:

Popularity of qooxdoo

I still don't understand why some technology "wins big" while another
doesn't (JS or otherwise), but technical merrits are not among the
main drivers. But although I understand this worries some of the
qooxdoo community, I don't think it is really a problem for qooxdoo
itself. qooxdoo is not going "to die" over it (which I think is a good
thing, for everybody investing in it). I think John's characterization
was to the point when he wrote qooxdoo was more an "internal project
at 1&1 that allows the community to get a copy of the code". What I
think needs more consideration is the other aspect.

Usefulness of qooxdoo

qooxdoo always tried to be ultimately useful for JS developers (being
popular or not), and I think so far it succeeded to a very large
degree . But as qooxdoo is not taking over the world it has to adapt
to the bigger movements in the industry, in order to maintain this
high degree of usabilty.

The project started to move the tool chain to Grunt, to take advantage
of the infrastructure being available there, which I think was an
excellent start.

Next, it might be necessary to make it available over NPM, and not
only the OO library but all parts, the class library, the tool chain,
the demos, the stand-alone libraries, you name it.

The biggest challenge here would be dependency management. qooxdoo
might need to adapt to the 'require' way of giving dependencies
explicitly, rather than inferring them from the code. This could be
the biggest hurdle in reaching the necessary interoperability with NPM
modules that know nothing about qooxdoo.

Finally, though it may still be a good stretch ahead, the new 'class'
keyword of JS challenges qooxdoo's OO system. In the end, I think
qooxdoo will have to yield to the new built-in, as I don't think
people will want to use a factory-based class system over a native
one.

So you may ask, given all those changes what will survive of qooxdoo?
- Here's my take: The excellent class code, the rich set of widgets
across desktop/website/mobile applications, the tool chain that
supports large and industrial-strength application development.

"May all your contributions become NPM modules." :-)

T.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Learn Graph Databases - Download FREE O'Reilly Book
"Graph Databases" is the definitive new guide to graph databases and their 
applications. Written by three acclaimed leaders in the field, 
this first edition is now available. Download your free book today!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/NeoTech
_______________________________________________
qooxdoo-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qooxdoo-devel

Reply via email to