And yet, to this day nothing comes even close to what ExtJS/Sencha offered and offers :(
The rise and fall of Ext JS
61–70 of 134 posts
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#62What 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.
perhaps, but why did they let the 'bills' get so high?
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#63I love ExtJS, and still use the version 5. This post is very true for me too. I didn't upgrade to version 6 because the new license system and the last versions is still very unstable in my tests.
But I will really miss the JSON-way of creating interface. With Xtypes everything is defined as a json object. And is incredible the customization options of their components. Other thing that I will miss a lot is how well integrated is the presentation components with their data layer.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#64I 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 r…
I doubt that ExtJS was parsing/analyzing JS code at runtime.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#65The article has one false assumption, "that IDERA is a company that focuses on SQL & other IT performance tools". It's not. They started focusing on developer tools in 2015, acquiring Embarcadero (Delphi and C++Builder.) Disclosure: I work there. So I know that they are more than the article says ;) I personally would suggest waiting and seeing what happens. Usually when there is an acquisition it is a good opportuni…
There's a dead comment below yours that says "IDERA fired the entire Ext JS dev team yesterday" -- is that true or false? Why was it downvoted to oblivion? Edit: apparently it's true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15366051
This exchange is pretty much what it felt like to be in the ExtJS community after jack slocum exited. The sencha people would make grand claims about the amazing things they would do for the community, then do essentially the opposite, and afterwards remain mute to all criticism. Nice to see that the Idera acquisition hasn’t changed anything.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#66This article misses a point as to why the community was outraged at the license change from LGPL to GPL. I was testing switching an application to EXT JS at the time, and I was really liking it. The prototype worked so well that we were preparing to get the commercial license, and then the license change happened.
After the change was announced, a number of people said they would fork and maintain the LGPL versions. One of the people behind EXT JS showed up in online discussions at the time and insisted that would be a violation.
The problem came from it not really being under LGPL. They tacked on this extra piece:
Ext is also licensed under the terms of the Open Source LGPL 3.0 license. You may use our open source license if you:
* Want to use Ext in an open source project that precludes using non-open source software
* Plan to use Ext in a personal, educational or non-profit manner
* Are using Ext in a commercial application that is not a software development library or toolkit, you will
meet LGPL requirements and you do not wish to support the project
The EXT JS company in online forums insisted they were wrong, and further outraged the community. A lot of people, myself included, decided to stop using EXT JS. We were planning on the commercial license, but the response of the company didn't feel right, and so like many others, we abandoned EXT JS.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#67I 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).
I feel like newer frameworks are catching up. I recently started using semantic-ui-react and so far I really like it. It's nowhere near as complete as Ext (doesn't even have a grid, just simple tables), but the trade off of cleaner and simpler development is a good one IMO
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#68Someone please explain me the difference between Override, Extend, Plugin and Mixin. And what happens when i apply all of them in any order to a given method. Could you also explain why basing your development on overriding and extending seemed like a good idea? Were people that scared of HTML and CSS?
Extend subclasses, mixin composes into a new class (like traits), override and plugin augment existing classes, with override replacing existing methods (which can break with every new release), and plugin fitting into a hook that remains compatible across releases.
All makes perfect sense to me. They’re standard OO techniques, the novelty was introducing them to JS developers.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I feel like newer frameworks are catching up. I recently started using semantic-ui-react and so far I really like it. It's nowhere near as complete as Ext (doesn't even have a grid, just simple tables), but the trade off of cleaner and simpler development is a good one IMO
I love Vue and React. It's the UI layer where things don't match up, however. There are plenty of examples of UI frameworks, some which sit atop React/Vue, that on the surface look to have everything ExtJS offers. Ext had hidden strength behind the scenes though. The Ext.util.Observable pattern for event handling; the Ext.data package for binding component data to server-side back-ends using Ajax, REST and SOAP proxies; under appreciated features such as keyboard navigation and state management with options to persist to cookies and local storage. At the time it felt bloated and the learning curve was crazy, but looking back on it in an age where heavy client-side JS apps reign supreme, it actually doesn't look all that bad.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#70I liked ExtJS 3.4 Never migrated to any newer version as it would require rewrite of our app which would negate any benefit for a long time. I instead dropped old browser compatibility cruft from ExtJS 3 and moved styling to sass/CSS3. Gutted all network access code too in favor of modern alternatives.
It worked fine. ExtJS 4 was overengineered and less performant and sencha cmd was crap.
I like the basic architecture and easy extensibility. Nothing "modern" compares if your goal is to have a basic app and be able to simply include another js file at the end to extend/override anything, even if you've not anticipated it in the basic app.
Nevertheless I'll never use it again for anything new. Its (ExtJS 3) basic architecture (component tree separate from DOM) is easily replicable in the modern browser (for the amount of money they're asking for a license) and that's all I really care for. I don't care for their widgets.
When web components will be supported universally, there will be no need for separate component tree, and for me that will be it for ExtJS's architecture.