I just want to express that tonight I gave extjs a serious attempt, struggled, switched to jQuery plugin alternatives, and succeeded very quickly.
I am developing my own framework to manage the addition of modules into a larger "application", with my own objects for retrieving data by AJAX, and my own event system for tying those modules together. I tried to incorporate extjs elements, and just couldn't get it to work. I replaced extjs's pre-built widgets with jQuery's DOM manipulation functionality, namely jdMenu to start, and it worked like a charm. I think the idea of importing raw XML or HTML and manipulating it using jQuery into more complex objects with advanced functionality is a better model for RIA development in the browser than the self-contained system of extjs where you rely on the ext framework to manage itself. I did want to say along the lines of our plugin standards discussion (which hopefully will produce something tangible) that it would be very nice if people built their functionality using jQuery.fn instead of $.fn because at least one other kit uses '$' to prefix their namespaces and no one else uses the jQuery prefix (obviously). -Ariel
