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The rise and fall of Ext JS

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Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#81

Post by Joeri »

fulafel wrote: post #18

The stage setting sounds a little too grim- JS debuggers (Venkman etc) and smartphones existed in 2005, and people haven't stopped using editors like vi or textmate to write code.

I built smartphone web apps in 2005, and I can assure you there wasn’t a single smartphone browser even close to being worth a damn. Safari on the original iphone was the first decent browser on a phone, everything before that was garbage from a JS developer perspective.

It is true that there were some desktop debugging tools (i remember a js debugger for IE6), but it was difficult to set up, and nothing like firebug or chrome dev tools. Live DOM inspection and editing didn’t exist.

Despite the lack of tooling and the horrors of IE6 I still feel that was a golden age in web dev. It was a time of wild experimentation, where a single js dev could gain global notoriety by creating a cool hack or a nice library.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#82

Post by hajile »

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.

Angular certainly didn't kill ExtJS. I was on a project that tried to move from Ext to Angular 1. UI-grid alone forced us to stay with Ext. Add in all the other Ext components and moving to Angular along with re-creating everything simply didn't make financial sense.

For what it's worth, I think they later re-wrote in React and integrated the Ext grid in that.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#83

Post by code_duck »

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 came to mind, but mainly because i only foggily remember ExtJS. I was actually thinking of the library that was widely popular before jQuery, the one it actually replaced - Prototype. While they compete in some way, jQueryUI is more similar to Ext than jQuery itself is.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#84

Post by gidan »

rrdharan wrote: post #45
reed1 wrote: post #40

Is it just me or medium's comment section is fundamentally wrong? It's always a pain for me to browse

It’s not you. It drives me insane. I really don’t understand why it requires so many page reloads to navigate a thread.

If you have too much noise in your comment section, Graphcomment is a nice (not free) alternative.

https://graphcomment.com/en

(I work for GraphComment)

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#85

Post by nkg »

LeonM wrote: post #17

I developed Ext-JS applications from 2011 till 2017, and during the ExtJS 4 time, it was great. I loved the quality of their documentation, and most importantly: the ability to comment on each class/method/property etc. This contained invaluable hints and insights. The community was really good. Then they upgraded ExtJS (can't remember if it was to Ext5 or 4.x) and deleted all the comments as 'no longer relevant'. Th…

There were a good ideas in that framework, and it felt like they wanted to build a really exhaustive, fully integrated UI building solution.

The company I worked for at the time had chosen it for the wrong reasons: their first incentive was the desktop-like UI that comes with ExtJs! But as I dove into it I understood what it was all about. ExtJs is/was a fat framework and I have felt overwhelmed many times, but if I compare it to our current daily tasks of gluing Stores, Components, and Views libs together for the same result, I am not sure we have improved anything.

I would like to hear someone thoughts on a potential contender.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#86

Post by vintagedave »

exhilaration wrote: post #54
vintagedave wrote: post #33

The 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

> "There's a dead comment below yours ... is that true or false?"

I do not know. I don't work in that part and couldn't comment if I did. I'm only commenting to point out that Idera does indeed focus on dev tools, where the article thought it didn't. FWIW, Delphi and C++Builder are still going strong under Idera.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#88

Post by lokerfoi »

What's the best way to migrate from ExtJS (50k LOC codebase)?

They had many excellent components, buffered lists, grouping in lists, tree panels etc. So many useful components.

Is there an alternative?

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#89

Post by of »

ExtJS - I have good memories of working with its well-documented, excellent API. For me, it was a precursor to learning iOS development. Only to denounce Apple shortly after, once I realized that Apple will insist that I continue to upgrade my hardware to their latest piece of shit perpetually, throughout my entire life. So yeah. I'm still a web developer. ^_^

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#90

Post by buckyball »

Joeri wrote: post #65
exhilaration wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it felt like to be in the ExtJS community after jack slocum exited

I've to admit that, on some rather rare occasions, I'm thinking about Jack Slocum and how he gave away/was taken away that thing that once was a truely remarkable, changeing lib for js, at least if you take into account when extjs was released. And I wonder what would have happen to him if he invented something like extjs in our venture capital and crowdfounding times.

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