Is qooxdoo a good choice for this use case?

Question

I would like to take a simple web page, and allow non-technie administrators to modify content simply by logging in, browsing to the page that is to be changed, and clicking on text to change things, or drag simple lists to re-order them.

My question is whether qooxdoo would be a good choice for this use case. I would want the text to display as it normally does, with magic htmlarea appearing on click, and similar features that don't disturb the visual layout.

Answer 1

Since you can use qooxdoo widgets in a normal webpage, and it has good DOM handling functions for picking and manipulating elements off a page, this might work quite well. But you may have to tread with caution to prevent having to reload the whole qooxdoo code as the editor switches from one page to another while admining since qooxdoo code is quite heavy. I could imagine something with an iframe containing the original site might work ... on the other hand there are already quite a number of CMSes out there ...

Answer 2

qooxdoo offers a Low-Level Library [1] for such DOM related tasks, if you don't want to have full qooxdoo widgets in your site. If you would like to have a qooxdoo list for example in your website, that's not a problem too. Take a look at the inline Apps [2] for those kinds of things. The DemoBrowser offers a nice demo of an inline App [3] which can give you an idea of how it could look.

Your use-cases are all possible with qooxdoo so I think qooxdoo is a good choice if you want to have a quality code base including all you need.

[1] http://qooxdoo.org/documentation/1.0#low_level_framework

[2] http://qooxdoo.org/documentation/1.0/ui_inline

[3] http://demo.qooxdoo.org/current/demobrowser/#root~Inline_Dynamic_Resize.html

Answer 3

The HtmlArea is also available as low-level component optimized for the use at traditional web-pages. So yes, qooxdoo might be a good choice for your use case. Since no UI-widgets (high-level) are involved the memory overhead should be acceptable here.

Just take a look at the namespace "qx.bom.htmlarea" which entered qooxdoo with version 1.0.