On 4/5/07, Ariel Jakobovits <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just curious, before I jump into developing a new project using Ext, from some of the real gurus on this list, what are the pros and cons of using this new lib?
I'm not a guru, but I have some experience with it. The company I am working for has been using it for a large RIA for the last 4 months. We started in version EXT 0.33 and cut in some of EXT 0.4 and some of EXT 1.0. He is soon to release 1.0 officially (within 30 days?) which refactors alot of code and changes the API of "some" components. Most notably is the grid. This 1.0 version is the one which is library independent and can use jQuery as a base. It's pretty large in file size, so I wouldn't think of it for e-commerce or brochureware. His (Jack Slocum) has a wonderful sense of style. It's awesome. Dialogs, Frames, ComboBoxes, Trees, Menus. They are beautiful and work very well. Lots of keyboard interactivity. He really thought of everything. It's a little bit of a kitchen-sink thing, but if file-size doesn't matter, he really covers all usability bases. I use his examples to show how great web UI can be without flash. One suggestion is to avoid the 0.33 stuff and stick to the 1.0 release. As Rey Bango can attest, there are lots of jQuery plugins that do similar things on a one-by-one basis. However, no one has all of the components wrapped up together with a strong and consistent API. Custom CSS on his stuff has proved to be easier than I thought. However, it's still not "easy". The hard core engineers here like his style of API and how it's easy to register listeners. Ultimately, it saved us a huge amount of time and the app looks great. Hope this helps, Glen