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Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

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21–30 of 91 posts

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#21
post #10

Another framework i barely hear about and surprised me a bit recently is sencha/ExtJS. They're growing a lot in the enterprise sector, but they managed to keep pretty up-to-date relative to web/open sources projects such as angular.Eg they added two-way data binding in their latest version in a not-to-ugly way. Anyone here got a real try on sencha (the full package, including sencha architect) recently ?

I'm actually writing a book on Ext JS 5 Application Architecture right now - but it's still a while off publication. In comparison to the projects mentioned in this article you're kind of looking at the difference between and framework and a library really.

Compare Ext JS with something like Backbone and in addition to the way in which Backbone/Underscore helps you implement an MVC structure you've now got a whole host of UI widgets, a class/dependency system, an optional build tool in Sencha Command.

The things that you'd say were feature-matches from Backbone would be stuff like Controllers (and in v5 ViewControllers), but there's a lot of stuff (like refs) to help that work with the UI components. I'd say that where ever there's an equivalent feature in Ext JS it's going to be a lot more complicated!

This is a burden and a curse. Like the config system that was brought in for v4. Initially seemed like overkill, can occasionally be a godsend but when you're working on complex class structures can be a massive PITA.

On top of that you have the licensing costs and indeed the licensing itself which was something that put people off of Ext JS a few years ago when they changed it. Plus I suspect "enterprise" shops will be interested in Sencha Architect too, which bumps up the cost.

Sencha Command does wind me up a little bit because it feels like an opaque mess built on top of ant. I just wish they could use something like gulp and have each part be a little clearer. In fact if they opened it up to the community on github that might be enough, they're not charging for it so I don't see the harm.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#22
post #10

Another framework i barely hear about and surprised me a bit recently is sencha/ExtJS. They're growing a lot in the enterprise sector, but they managed to keep pretty up-to-date relative to web/open sources projects such as angular.Eg they added two-way data binding in their latest version in a not-to-ugly way. Anyone here got a real try on sencha (the full package, including sencha architect) recently ?

I've worked on two big projects using ExtJS and both of them were/are nightmares: the code is complicated, tied very deeply to the ExtJS infrastructure, if there's a bug you wait on Sencha and you are probably going to have to pay for an expensive consultant at some point.

Now, I'm pretty negative on client-side MVC anyway (see intercooler.js) so I'm probably not a fair judge, but if I were starting a project today that had to have a large client-side footprint, I'd avoid ExtJS.

I will say that ExtJS looks great OOTB and comes with a ton of widget functionality when compared with other options, so if you want to get something done really quickly with, say, a tree UI, that might be a reason to look at them harder.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#24
post #6

What, no React/Flux? How can this be a serious comparison without React?

Flux might still be in the early adopter phase. Version 0.11 might be nice for side projects, but I'd feel uncomfortable trying to deploy a commercial app using a project that has been available to the public for less than 6 months.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#25

JS frameworks are absolute cancer. They do nothing but kill page load times and degrade user experience: since when is it a good idea to recompile the whole entire standard library each time a program is run? They're also completely redundant in the modern browser, since standard compliance has gotten much better and more features have been added to HTML/JS/CSS. It's just yet another api that developers have to learn…

I consider developer productivity and code maintainability to be features. Sure, there are performance tradeoffs, but there are some obvious benefits.

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#26
post #10

Another framework i barely hear about and surprised me a bit recently is sencha/ExtJS. They're growing a lot in the enterprise sector, but they managed to keep pretty up-to-date relative to web/open sources projects such as angular.Eg they added two-way data binding in their latest version in a not-to-ugly way. Anyone here got a real try on sencha (the full package, including sencha architect) recently ?

I develop with Sencha frameworks full time. The learning curve is on the same level as Ember, while not easy but still manageable, unlike many people want you to believe.

ExtJS component life cycle changed a lot form 4.0 to 4.2 and they refactored the code to be more like Sencha Touch. I guess this is the preamble to ExtJS 5, and it confuses a lot of people.

Sencha delivers on cross browser compatibility, since their layouts are all done by JavaScript. Trying to add CSS layout on top of that will break a lot of things. This is the so called "fighting the framework" people in Sencha community calls it. ExtJS 5 lets you develop desktop/touch hybrid apps for touch laptops. With smooth scrolling driven by touch event and transition, they work on Android as well (where it doesn't have WebKit overflow scroll touch)

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#29
For everyone here who says "Backbone is great except..." I'd encourage you to try Apmersand.js from the great folks at &yet. It's nearly idential to Backbone, fixes some of the oddities (like wrapping divs and needing to call model.set/get) They've also worked to make it more modular and extensible.

http://ampersandjs.com/

Re: Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework

#30
post #10

Another framework i barely hear about and surprised me a bit recently is sencha/ExtJS. They're growing a lot in the enterprise sector, but they managed to keep pretty up-to-date relative to web/open sources projects such as angular.Eg they added two-way data binding in their latest version in a not-to-ugly way. Anyone here got a real try on sencha (the full package, including sencha architect) recently ?

I do ExtJS allll-daaay long, because my company built every back-office we made upon that framework. Pro: It looks and feels like a desktop application. B2B loves that! (And that's why we use it) Cons: It requires you to write gigantic blocks of code to get something up and running. + Many times you will say to yourself "they can't have forgotten THAT feature", and well, they did and you have to DIY
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