JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Ext JS 5 introduced support for components in grid cells using the new “widgetcolumn”. At the same time, Ext JS 5 introduced a new type of lightweight component called a “Widget”. There are several widgets included in Ext JS 5, and this article will show you how easy it is to build your own.

For years ExtJS has been a leading JavaScript development UI framework for web and Hybrid applications. This new version cleans out a series of legacy features and adds many modern enhancements. These include moving towards HTML5, bringing corporate applications to larger touch devices and adding more widgets to an already impressive widget collection.

Sencha have made the process of upgrading to ExtJS 5.x from ExtJS4.x fairly trivial, with a built-in compatibility layer giving developers a development-only shim that provides console messages during development alerting them to areas they need to focus on to transition to the new framework.

Both of these frameworks define a reference architecture for developing single page web applications, providing developers with the means to:

• declaratively construct a user interface from constituent components,
• correlate user interface gestures to corresponding business logic,
• retrieve and persist data to data sources, and
• structure application logic in a manner that enforces separation of concerns.

However, these two frameworks go about solving these problems through fundamentally different approaches.

ExtJS vs AngularJS. ExtJS and AngularJS are the two industry leading frameworks for Rich UI development.
This article compares these two frameworks over 30+ points around benefits, architecture, testing, mobility, performance, build and deployment among other things.

ExtJS vs AngularJS:

• Feature Comparison
• Performance Comparison Stats
• When to use which framework
• Architectural Differences
• Next Steps

Architectural Differences:
* Application Design Framework
* Components
* Routing benefits
* Testability
* Data Binding
* SEO Friendly
* Mobile Solutions
* Dom Approach
* Deferred and Promises
* Dirty checking
* Deferred bootstrap

Among other things in this blog post I’ll describe an example of how the usage of real-time can save you 99% of backend requests, while making your code simpler and your user interface snappier along the way.

Then, about a year ago, I stumbled across an old friend of mine who happens to be the author ofAutobahn, an open-source real-time framework for Web, Mobile & Internet of Things.

It took some time until I was convinced of the simplicity of his technology, but eventually I found that I did not need to understand the inner complications of sending messages over WebSocket from A to B in order to use Autobahn.

Once I had WebSocket working in my app, I was just a tiny step away from getting server pushed messages into the client browser. I very much liked this idea to get rid of those refresh buttons everywhere in the frontend. That was a low hanging fruit then and I quickly got some really nice changes in interface design (like live chat, object locking in the frontend and real-time refresh).

Two frameworks with a very different approaches, but both with the same driving force – make the web work for web apps.
The difference in approach is that one, chooses to embrace the the web and it’s standards and significantly improve them while the other layers out on top of it and gives you an awesome layer of abstraction.

When i started working with Ext JS five years ago web development was still pretty hard. Ajax and jQuery along with strong JavaScript advocates like Douglas Crockford, started making JavaScript popular. But two large problems still remained -

1) making the UI look and behave more like a desktop.

 2) creating a solid application structure(MV***) was still a big challenge.

That’s when i met extjs and i was amazed!

WebDriver is great, but since a lot of javascript events are happening in the background it’s very difficult to write a easily usable DSL to manipulate the UI. One has to wait for ajax calls to finish, for DOM elements to appear or disappear, and so on. Tests became instable and failed sometimes, even sometimes on the CI build but never on your development environment. It takes more and more time to find & fix those things.

Siesta is a product from Bryntum especially written to unit test Extjs applications, focussing on the UI. Sounds nice, so we decided to check it out as a possible alternative to WebDriver

While these individual libraries and the resulting custom stack have the potential to do some things very well, the unfortunate reality is that a great deal of the functionality must be gathered together from disparate sources, written in-house and require a dedicated team of maintainers in order to meet the demands of enterprise software development.