Book Image

qooxdoo Beginner's Guide

Book Image

qooxdoo Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Over the past few years, all the major internet or enterprise applications are developed or migrated to Rich Internet Application to support all the features that are provided in the desktop applications. This helps organizations keep the end users happy and also improves application deployment and maintenance. qooxdoo is a stable, open source RIA framework. If you are waiting and watching for the right time to migrate your application to qooxdoo, this is the right time!This book explains in detail about the rich user interface development in qooxdoo. It explains various concepts of qooxdoo framework in an easy to grasp and organized way, making it simple even for a novice in qooxdoo and also increases the competency level of the developer who is already working in qooxdoo.This book helps developers understand the qooxdoo framework, setup the environment, and start the development of RIA using qooxdoo. You will learn the core programming techniques in qooxdoo, user interface development in qooxdoo, testing & debugging qooxdoo applications, internationalization of qooxdoo applications to multiple languages, customizing the look and feel of qooxdoo applications using Themes, Performance management, etc.In the course of the book, we develop a complete application which will help the developer to understand the concepts better and to put things together to see the step-by-step progress to complete an application. By the end, this book will get the developer accustomed to the widgets and API available in the qooxdoo framework, and will enable him to design, develop, debug, and test the RIA in qooxdoo.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
qooxdoo
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
References

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.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is qooxdoo?, helps the developer to get an overview of the qooxdoo framework, to get to know what the framework provides, to know the architecture of the qooxdoo framework, and to get a feel of the RIA developed in qooxdoo.

Chapter 2, Say Hello to qooxdoo World!, guides the developer in setting up the development environment for the qooxdoo framework, to understand the communication with the server, and to set up one of the RPC servers that comes as a contribution project.

Chapter 3, Core Programming Concepts, explains the core programming concepts of qooxdoo. This chapter is a very important chapter as it explains the implementation syntax of basic object-oriented concepts such as class, interface, and so on. This chapter will help the developer to construct the application code in an object-oriented way.

Chapter 4, Working with Layouts and Menus, explains the layout design, toolbars, and menu bars.

Chapter 5, Working with Widgets, helps the developer to know about the various widgets available in the qooxdoo framework.

Chapter 6, Working with Forms and Data, explains form handling and data store support in the qooxdoo framework.

Chapter 7, Testing and Debugging, explains how to test and debug the qooxdoo application, as well as how to fix the identified issues.

Chapter 8, Internationalization, helps the developer to internationalize and localize the qooxdoo application to multiple languages.

Chapter 9, Working with Themes, aids the developer in understanding the theme support in qooxdoo and in designing a custom theme for the application.

Chapter 10, Performance, helps the developer to monitor and improve the performance of the qooxdoo application.

Chapter 11, Miscellaneous, covers a few miscellaneous topics that complete your understanding of qooxdoo.

Appendix, Pop Quiz Answers, contains the answers to all the pop quiz questions for all the chapters.

References: It contains the references used in this book.

What you need for this book

qooxdoo is completely based on object-oriented JavaScript. So, what you should be well versed in is just JavaScript. If you know the object-oriented concepts and have worked with any object-oriented language, such as Java, it will really help you to understand the qooxdoo programming concepts pretty quickly. Even if you haven't worked with any of the object-oriented languages, it is okay; you can learn the object-oriented concepts with qooxdoo.

Even though it is web development, you don't need to know HTML, DOM, CSS, and so on. qooxdoo generates HTML in runtime from the JavaScript code that you have written.

Who this book is for

This book is intended for the client-side developers who design and develop Internet web applications and enterprise web applications. If you want to start developing RIA in qooxdoo, this book would be of great help to jump start your development. If you are already developing qooxdoo applications, this book will help you to go through the qooxdoo framework quickly to improve your contribution to your project.

This book helps the beginners in qooxdoo to easily set up the development environment and explains the concepts in an order that can easily be grasped by beginners.

This book also provides an idea for the architects and lead developers to know about qooxdoo and evaluate the framework.

This book is also intended for the desktop application developers who want to move into RIA development and develop rich Internet applications and rich enterprise web applications.

Conventions

In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.

To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:

Time for action - heading

  1. 1. Action 1

  2. 2. Action 2

  3. 3. Action 3

Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:

What just happened?

This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.

You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:

Pop quiz

These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.

You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Besides regular classes, it offers abstract, static, or singleton classes."

A block of code is set as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"
/>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

E:\>python
ActivePython 2.7.1.3 (ActiveState Software Inc.) based on
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Feb 7 2011, 11:30:38) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Add Feed menu in the toolbar and add any feed that you want to put into the feed reader."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply send an e-mail to, and mention the book title via the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the errata submission form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded on our website, or added to any list of existing errata, under the Errata section of that title. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.

Piracy

Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works, in any form, on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.

Please contact us at with a link to the suspected pirated material.

We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

You can contact us at if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.