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The rise and fall of Ext JS

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Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#41

Post by catpolice »

I remember the moment when I drew a line in the sand and simply refused to use ExtJS any more: I discovered that the mysterious bug I'd been hunting all day went away if I removed a comment.

It turns out that ExtJS was building some kind of dependency tree by scanning my source code (at runtime!) and looking for things that looked like variable assignments. And it got confused by a commented-out assignment. I don't remember exactly how this caused things to break, but I do remember walking through the stack trace, slowly figuring out what it was doing, and then simply getting up and leaving for the day.

No thanks.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#42

Post by minsight »

Idera bought out a company that I used to work for. They immediately let half of the workforce go without compensation. They are normally (in Canada) expected to pay severance, but an extremely optimistic interpretation of our employment contracts led them to believe that they could let us go and pay severance to anyone who was still unemployed some lengthy time (If I remember correctly, about 9 months) later. They are the Gordon Gekkos of the software world and I wish them absolutely no success. If you get bought out by them, lawyer up and start searching for a job immediately. If a product that you use is acquired by them, then start shopping for an alternative.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#43

Post by Joe8Bit »

debaserab2 wrote: post #19
Joe8Bit wrote: post #12

It's interesting that in such an otherwise complete account of ExtJS that so little is made of the rise (and subsequent fall) of jQuery. The author rightfully talks about some of the (terrible) decisions made by the frameworks owners, that pushed folks from the community; but (imo) the greater effect was the rise of jQuery, which embraced an open source model ExtJS scorned and built a staggeringly large community whi…

jQuery is dom traversal and manipulation (with a common ajax interface) - ExtJS is (was) a UI framework. It's an apples and oranges comparison - I worked on several ExtJS projects, all of which used jQuery for one thing or another. I think it's actually pretty accurate to say that frameworks like angular are more responsible for its decline since their feature sets are much more similar.

Of course you're right, and maybe I phrased it poorly, my intention was to highlight the jQuery eco-system as the main puller of folks from ExtJ e.g. jQueryUI and the 10,000's of jQuery plugins that replicated ExtJS/Sencha functionality several dozen times over (with various levels of quality).

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#44

Post by joelennon »

nodelessness wrote: post #14

What the community probably didn't realise is that bills had to be paid in a tough situation. The price rise was not something they did out of greed but rather something of a last ditch effort to be profitable.

It wasn't a last ditch effort, the decision to change the pricing model happened 3 years ago. I think the community would have accepted a reasonable rise in price, it was the decision to mandate a minimum purchase of 5 developer licenses that sealed their fate.

Sencha's biggest failure was not building developer mindshare. If they wanted to sell commercial widgets, they should have done just that - their grid was pretty amazing and is probably the feature that led most people to discovering ExtJS in the first place. Instead they tried to sell an entire framework, with an entirely custom approach to building software. For that model to succeed, they should have made the framework itself free on a liberal open source license, and focused harder on selling services, extensions and tools around it. That way, it would have been embraced by more developers, widened the talent pool and encouraged their big corporate customers to expand the scope of its use in their companies.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#46

Post by joelennon »

k__ wrote: post #39

I started JS in 2011 with ExtJS 4 and it was pretty awesome. Later it got too bloated and expensive and I switched to Ember. Whole other thing. Missed all the widgets ExtJS had out of the box. Also, it seemed that Ember used MVC like ExtJS, but had a totally different idea about it. Now use React and craft most widgets by hand, didn't expect a framework to be so flexible. React components feel like using the ExtJS xT…

Sencha were working on a project called ExtReact that allowed you to use ExtJS components in React, replacing the JSON-style component declaration syntax with JSX. This would have been pretty amazing - as ExtJS' biggest strength was always the variety and depth of their components (especially the grid).

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#47

Post by everdev »

ExtJS was a web client of mine from '09. They were well funded, but always seemed more focused on the next round of funding than their product. Also, they seemed to penetrate the corporate market, but not the average developer. Some smart people on that team though.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#48

Post by cjauvin »

As a solo freelancer, I have developed and maintained an internal management web app for a small wine importing company from 2012 to this day: a huge portion of its 15+ KLOCs codebase is ExtJS 4 (the rest is the Python backend) and I have mixed feelings about it.. Given the heavy use of complex widgets and layouts (the Grid component in particular does about everything you could ever imagine, and probably more), I often think that porting to another (more modern?) framework would be almost impossible.. I regularly browse what's available, and I'm certain that an upgrade based on a React + Material stack of some kind would be an interesting evolution, but I'm not sure I have the courage to undertake such an endeavor (not to mention the fact that my client probably wouldn't see the immediate advantage). Despite the often-mentioned appreciable learning curve (which I can't really appreciate anymore since it's been amortized on so many years and hacking sessions), here are four things I appreciate the most of Ext JS:

1. The fact that well-written Ext JS code has a very "declarative" feel to it, despite being JS

2. The documentation is very complete and written with love

3. The dev environment I've been using is very monolithic, and seems very far from the incredibly scattered stack of tools that seem to slowly poison the JS landscape and culture, and which we often read articles about on HN

4. The community (at least when I was interacting with it on a more regular basis) is great

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#49

Post by harel »

Interestingly I found ExtJs (3) when I was evaluating every single data grid component there was. I found theirs to be the best at the time (2009) and went all in to the framework. Someone mentioned a love/hate relationship and that's pretty accurate. The level of polish on it was unlike anything else at the time but it was an all-in proposition. You had to buy into the eco system and stay in to use it.
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