Article's a bit over a year old, but the points it raises are still very valid.
As the creator & maintainer of a large ExtJS application (stockor.com/demo), I find it very much a mixed bag.
Love the comprehensive widgets that are all integrated with the data sources. Back in the early days of SPA architecture I'd say they were far above everyone else.
Hate the slow, JS driven layouts. Something that's not immediately obvious when using ExtJS is that all layout is conducted by it's own engine and applied via inline style tags which set the width/height of each element. This might have made sense back in the IE3/4 days (when I started using it), but I find it really sucks now since you're hobbling the browser and not allowing it to do what it does best - Laying out webpages.
And there's the perennial bugs. Sencha is attempting to re-create the entire web ecosystem themselves, so it's no surprise that they don't quite pull it off seamlessly. I won't elaborate on this too much since it's pretty easy to visit their own forums to get a sense of the frustration level with this.
I'd posit that ExtJS made quite a bit of sense back when IE4 support was still a big thing, but I'm pretty sure it's best days are behind it. I'm sure it'll hang on for quite awhile in corporate environments, but I don't see any reason to use it for new development.
Your app is I think the perfect use case for ExtJS.You need widgets,charts .... all in one place ready for use.No directives or jQuery plugins to write. That's why the framework was created as first place ,LOB apps in JS instead of flex/silverlight.
They just forgot the declarative part that made flex and silverlight easy to work with. I personally dont like these huge JSON like scripts to configure a component. But I guess that's also why they sell a IDE.
How about unit testing? does ExtJS provides tools for that today?
Yeah, I agree that ExtJS is a pretty good fit for Stockor, and is why I choose it originally.
Now I'm struggling with being more responsive and wanting to open the code up for embedding widgets into third party pages. Extjs really doesn't work well for either of those cases.
As for testing: They've got some fairly decent tools for it. I'm just using Jasmine though.
I think you're misremembering IE's version numbers. ExtJS started up as a YUI extension called YUI-ext circa 2006. IE3-4 were long dead by then. You might be thinking of IE7-6.
I may be misremembering, but my recollection was my then employer started using Ext version 2 primarily since it had the rich widget ecosystem and also supported IE 4 well. We were writing internal enterprise apps and it was a good fit.
As you can guess, that's been quite awhile ago. My memory is fuzzy on the details to be sure.
What would you choose now? taking into account open source and commercial products.
I am feeling a Windows GUI development deja vu with the current web UI state of the art. You could see excellent or nice user interfaces (e.g. winamp) but at the end they are custom made. Even Microsoft didn't provide the basic widgets (thinking in MFC) to build a basic application.
Thats the one thing ExtJS has going for it...a full suite of widgets that make it so any jackass can plop in a data table and move on.
The problem is when you want anything outside the realm of those widgets, or actual proper program structure and html/css...then you are in for the fun.
But as far as a replacement where you have a full suite of ready-made widgets you just wire up? I am not sure there is anything else out there near as comprehensive. Everything else will require you to wire up the logic for each of your widgets at the least...there are some html/css frameworks that will get you your widget on the page, but behavior? That's up to you.
Exactly! Well said, "any jackass can plop in a data table and move on." The problem with that approach is that it's very deceptively easy. The data table morphs into a screen, then into an app, and before long you've got a big fat steaming pile of JS that is a 5mb download.
And then you get some really weird bugs like "If these two components are layed out inside an hbox, every once in a while you get a "Layout Run Failed" exception". Not that that's happened to me or anything :)
I'm actually in the middle of an exploratory re-write to use straight Backbone. I'm hopping to wrap up widgets like DataTable, Select2 and such into Backbone views and use them.
It's early days on it, but am hopeful that I'll arrive at something useful.
I really like Telerick. They do seem to have a good system of widgets and data bindings. I haven't used them in anger though so don't really know for sure.
I was pretty bummed they removed the grid from the open-source components though. That's the main thing that's stopped me from going further in evaluating them
One thing missing from KendoUI for me is the TreeGrid. Last I checked (a few months ago), it's still not available. It's an important component in our solutions.
As the creator & maintainer of a large ExtJS application (stockor.com/demo), I find it very much a mixed bag.
Love the comprehensive widgets that are all integrated with the data sources. Back in the early days of SPA architecture I'd say they were far above everyone else.
Hate the slow, JS driven layouts. Something that's not immediately obvious when using ExtJS is that all layout is conducted by it's own engine and applied via inline style tags which set the width/height of each element. This might have made sense back in the IE3/4 days (when I started using it), but I find it really sucks now since you're hobbling the browser and not allowing it to do what it does best - Laying out webpages.
And there's the perennial bugs. Sencha is attempting to re-create the entire web ecosystem themselves, so it's no surprise that they don't quite pull it off seamlessly. I won't elaborate on this too much since it's pretty easy to visit their own forums to get a sense of the frustration level with this.
I'd posit that ExtJS made quite a bit of sense back when IE4 support was still a big thing, but I'm pretty sure it's best days are behind it. I'm sure it'll hang on for quite awhile in corporate environments, but I don't see any reason to use it for new development.