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The rise and fall of Ext JS

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Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#121

Post by catpolice »

hoskdoug wrote: post #113
whipoodle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so what's your explanation?

OP is confused.

I wish that I had been confused, it was an appalling thing to find. Basically, it was an interaction between the template system (https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/6.5.0/modern/src/Template.js.h...) and their dynamic class loader (https://docs.sencha.com/extjs/6.5.0/modern/src/Loader.js.htm...). The template system used regexes to look for JS expressions to evaluate inside HTML templates and then tried to figure out how to supply them with values. I had some /very/ complicated templates and IIRC it picked up on some commented out bits and ended up triggering the loader's dependency resolution. Again, I'm not saying it was running like a babel-style parser in the browser - it was just regexing for certain expressions and dynamically loading classes based on the results.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#122

Post by a-kojeve »

AgentME wrote: post #117
andreineculau wrote: post #96

As a developer of some "popular" widgets, I owe a great deal to ExtJS because it taught me that encapsulation, especially in JavaScript, a scripted language with defacto accessible source code, is just absurd. A simple thing like that reminded me of functional programming and the rest is history. Extending a dropdown component meant that i had to copy some closure just to change a number in a wrapped function, and th…

Encapsulation to me is about limiting the supported API. It sucks to release something, and then find many of your users are depending on accidentally-exposed private values or functions that are all going to break if you do the dream refactor needed to fix all the previous problems and enable new stuff. In situations where the API consumers can't pin an old version (like how a plugin can't choose the version of the…

I agree. I like functional programming, but at some point, you're going to have some type of encapsulation, whether at the closure, module, actor, or network boundary. It's always important to think about what API you're exposing.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#124

Post by netghost »

buckyball wrote: post #90
Joeri wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh those were pretty venture capital times as well.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#125

Post by pixie_ »

Really interesting article. I used ext js for a project and found the components worked better than anything I've ever used. The grid is super powerful and polished. Setting up a server backed customized drop down is super easy. Lookups are powerful. Trees and charts are powerful. Their dialog builder works super well. A lot of the components can be built, positioned, embedded with a purely declarative json syntax. If it stayed under the BSD license I have no doubt we would all be using it today. For building super data heavy internal enterprise apps it's amazing. Check out their component examples here -

http://examples.sencha.com/extjs/6.2.0/examples/kitchensink/...

Unfortunately I wouldn't recommend using it due to the licensing mess. So depressing.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#126

Post by k__ »

joelennon wrote: post #69
city41 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proxi…

I avoid stuff like react elements or native base and try to do all components myself.

These things often bring problems when you try to update the framework, because they're always behind.

Sometimes I have to pull in a few components, like navigation or carrousels because things get to complex or I lack the time, but I usually try to let the UI be self-contained.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#127

Post by mstijak »

avremel wrote: post #107

Can anyone recommend a stable, well documented alternative to Ext JS grids? I am currently developing with React, and would like to replace our internal tables with something as fully featured as Ext JS. (Features like remote filtering, inline editing, custom components, custom queries, etc).

CxJS offers a complete grid solution + all other components

- https://docs.cxjs.io/widgets/grids

- https://fiddle.cxjs.io/?f=vwyHzOO1

Disclaimer: Autor here

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#128

Post by mstijak »

People should give more credit to Ext JS. For a long time, Ext JS was the best choice for enterprise applications and made possible for web applications to replace desktop dinosaurs, such as inventory, accounting, trading apps, etc. Sencha is still a great choice for such apps as it offers components optimized for "data-intensive" apps, but with ES6 and React they are behind technologically.

My company is selling premium themes for ExtJS and we saw a big decline in sales with Ext JS 5 and Ext JS 6, especially after the "min 5 license" change.

We're now working on our own framework called CxJS which has features similar to React, Angular and Ext JS combined. Please take a look if you're looking for an alternative to Ext JS.

https://cxjs.io/

https://www.codaxy.com/Themes

https://docs.cxjs.io/widgets/grids

https://cxjs.io/examples

https://starter.cxjs.io/dashboards/sales

https://worldoscope.cxjs.io/4v5b3k2

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#129

Post by robpalmer »

albeva wrote: post #27
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…

I have fond memories of ExtJS until version 4 was released. I used to be huge advocate of extjs at our company, but I remember feeling horror and dismay seeing how down hill it went with 4.0. Communication with the community, their pricing policies, quality, perfomance ... too many issues. We pretty much stopped using it and ported all our projects away from it. It really was a sad day. It was ultimately their mad pu…

I met Art, the Sencha CEO, back in 2013 after having some positive experiences using Sencha Touch on iOS to develop consumer-facing apps. He said that the company was going to solely focus on Enterprise because that's what the investors wanted.

At the time that felt like it signalled the death of the company. I note that the successful JS ecosystems we have today are not enterprise-only or consumer-only.

Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS

#130

Post by avremel »

mstijak wrote: post #127
avremel wrote: post #107

Can anyone recommend a stable, well documented alternative to Ext JS grids? I am currently developing with React, and would like to replace our internal tables with something as fully featured as Ext JS. (Features like remote filtering, inline editing, custom components, custom queries, etc).

CxJS offers a complete grid solution + all other components - https://docs.cxjs.io/widgets/grids - https://fiddle.cxjs.io/?f=vwyHzOO1 Disclaimer: Autor here

What about remote data? I don't see any mention of built in options for remote sorting, filtering and editing.
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