Our project management app - paymoapp.com is built on Sencha and we're a bit worried. We spent a lot of resources building ext6 apps on top of the old ext4 core - hopeful Idera won't do crazy stuff, it's a good framework worth saving.
The rise and fall of Ext JS
71–80 of 134 posts
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#72I 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…
> Then they upgraded ExtJS (can't remember if it was to Ext5 or 4.x) and deleted all the comments as 'no longer relevant'.
Oh, wow.
My observation is that treating documentation thoughtlessly is frequently a leading indicator that "treating their community like shit" is coming soon.
Product folks and developer evangelists: never do this. Never do the thing where you simply blow away a community-grown resource. If you're absolutely sure you're in a situation that's the exception, you are probably still wrong. Wait a year or two after you're sure. Then warn people and give them a year to save whatever they think is valuable.
Any other approach is telegraphing either thoughtlessness or contempt, possibly both.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#73Earlier 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 worked at a company for 4 years that used Ext for everything. I got to know the framework really well. Everything you say is true, but I honestly don't miss it. I like that React (I've never used Vue), leaves this open to your choice.
Sencha really wanted their customers to lock into Ext and not be able to leave. I like that modern solutions are about choice and flexibility.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#74> 2005: Smart phones did not exist. Yeah, ok.
Well, yeah. Phones at that time were mostly just laid out to render WAP pages only, if anything at all. And virtually nobody used that feature. Phones actually rending HTML/CSS/JS in a useful way came years later, roughly 2007+.
Umm, you are completely wrong. I was using Handspring (and Later Palm) Treo starting from 2002 or so, and it did a pretty decent job of rendering major websites. Yeah, Blazer (Handspring browser) wasn't always perfect or fast, but it definitely didn't not "render WAP pages only". It was full web. By the time I upgraded to Treo 650 around 2004 or so, browsing web on mobile was in full swing. A few times when I was in a pinch in the airport I'd pull up Orbitz and look up/book flights on a regular website interface. Also, being on Sprint which just unrolled CDMA2000 and later EV-DO helped tremendously with this experience.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#75I 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.
OK, so what's your explanation?
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#76I 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.
ExtJS required a custom build system (sencha) so it’s possible it’s related to that.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#77It'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…
You need to tell google how to interpret the search terms by clicking each term and refining it via the dropdown. In your example, this is obvious because "reactjs" is a flat line at 0 which doesn't make sense.
I've somewhat fixed it here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... but wasn't sure how to further specify Sencha.
Else Google Trends is worthless data unless you do this.
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#78With the world full of Reactish frameworks now I wonder if someday we will return back to these neat frameworks that understood browser limitations really well and created such a surreal experience in the initial days of SPA. Names like Prototype JS, Mootools, Dojo etc. where evolving with some great ideas and Ext JS took it to a whole new level. It's sad to see demise of most of these libraries (jQuery I think is th…
What do you think has been lost?
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#79The 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
if anyone of the people let go is interested in remote work (we're based in Europe) on an Ext project please get in touch at https://www.paymoapp.com/contact/
Re: The rise and fall of Ext JS
#80ExtJS is a prime example of what I like to call "Best Buy Developers".
What are "Best Buy Developers" you ask?
They are the kind of software engineers who shop for frameworks like they are shopping for a TV at Best Buy. What if I need to watch YouTube inside my grid component?! What if I need to add in sorting that can only be done on the server-side? What if the application grows to be 10,000 forms? goes the thinking. Instead of focusing on absolute simplicity, clean code, minimal dependencies, pragmatism and addressing the needs of the application at the present time, they try to predict the future needs of the application without having any ideas on what the future could possibly look like and not being product visionaries themselves. Everyone always wants to feel like they can predict the future and have solutions ready for problems that don't exist yet, but most of the time they're wrong and the abstractions created in the process, in retrospect, look rather crazy. I speak from experience here.
At the time ExtJS was becoming popular, there was a big desire to duplicate the desktop look and feel in the browser. Anyone remember the ExtJS desktop interface, complete with start button??? I'm guilty of making on those beasts, complete with graphs and windows that could be dragged and minimized. It made for good demos, but wasn't useful. It turns out that the web offers a lot better UI's and UX interaction concepts than desktop apps and it was a poor decision to try and duplicate 1990's and early 2000 UI paradigms in the browser. It was cool at the time you could duplicate a Microsoft Access style fancy filter grid component (and to your boss who didn't know about ExtJS it made you look cool), and frankly many people latched on to it because it was beyond their abilities to do in raw HTML/CSS, and the API was well done, and hid a lot of the early complexity with doing more complicated layouts in CSS and javascript and slow browsers of the day. For your typical engineer who couldn't implement drag and drop using raw mouse events and the DOM, ExtJS provided an easy way to get their job done.
I was an early adopter of ExtJS (since version 1 and I used 2 and 3). I remember being excited about the remoting framework and I'd spend a lot of time dreaming up UI's created with components from the kitchen sink page. I was excited when the designer came out. I tried to convince everyone at my current company to use it, thank god they ignored me. I remained excited about it for a little while longer...
But then something changed. I changed the way I approached software. I no longer cared about fancy stuff. I started to care more about the actual product and what it can do, how easy it is to use for the user, and if it actually solved the problem or not (rather than look fancy or like "big boy" desktop software). I started to not care about component libraries. I learned that its more important to have absolute simplicity and pragmatism than a big framework with a kitchen sink that can seemingly do everything and solve all your problems.
And just like that, I said goodbye to ExtJS and moved on with the rest of my life.