@whutevr: I agree about their statements regarding doctypes (quirks mode may be an easy target, but it’s a lousy target). I also disagree with their use of browser sniffing instead of feature detection.

@Les: It’s true that they don’t bother much with base code performance. I get why they don’t though. My personal experience (and this extends beyond ExtJS) is that benchmark performance is almost completely unrelated to web app performance. The bottlenecks in real-world web apps have to do with server-side load and sequentiality in the loading of resources. The yahoo exceptional performance rules don’t bother with optimizing javascript algorithms, and the reason is that for most applications exceptional performance can be had even with slow javascript algorithms. My experiences so far with building extjs apps bares this out, although in all honesty I have yet to ship one (still in development for another three months).

@fargueta: I’m disappointed you don’t want to have a serious discussion. I’m also disappointed nobody else wants to have that discussion, since nobody e-mailed me. I remain open to anyone genuinely interested in having a serious discussion about the extjs licensing questions. In support of that, I’ve emailed the FSF with concrete questions as to whether or not using extjs (or any other GPL javascript toolkit) requires you to release your source or buy a commercial license instead. I’ll post the response back here.

The reason I’m so ardently arguing in favor of extjs is that I think technically it is the best javascript framework on the market (open source or commercial), and I feel that this level of excellence deserves respect and a full and intellectually honest debate about the merits and downsides. Even if they’re wrong about everything, they deserve a better discussion than what this thread has given them so far.

The question asked by the user a simple one, but they simply refuse to answer publicly. The question was addressed to Abe, but every other Ext sidekick has replied trying to avoid answering the actual question except Abe.

http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=67319

Ah, I see. Yes, with Dijit that’s true but that’s not the only way to do it. We’ve found that there’s a lot of desire to be able to quickly prototype an application using declarative syntax, and that’s what that was referring to. You can still do all of that work in Javascript (and we kind of recommend you do anyways, when moving to production).

The basic idea is to let you quickly develop apps by just adding a few attributes to existing HTML tags.

As far as deleting the post, I don’t know if they did, and I don’t know what their reason was, so I’m not going to comment.

To the ext haters: what did the ext team do to you personally to make you hate them this much? I really want to know. Mail me at joeri_sebrechts@hotmail.com or answer here

We don’t want them to have to learn Javascript necessarily.  Using Dojo widgets should be like writing HTML tags.

This, obviously, isn’t the same thing, quite the opposite in-fact. I still find the idea offensive, but I did misquote and I am sorry.

The charting examples for Ext are not live, but you can find them in the SDK.

If there was nothing to hide why delete post rather than address the issue with facts. Having 2 major releases in a year, with critical fixes not being supported in the previous versions is certainly not typical of every commercial development tool.

Dijit is designed so that you can create a template, in HTML and CSS, that is reusable. This means that you can mark a node (usually a DIV) as a placeholder for a Dijit, and Dijit will either fill in or replace that node with the contents of the template.

In some respects, this may have been what whoever it was doing the presentation was referring to.

However, that doesn’t mean we try to insulate you from having to know or develop your own HTML; Dijit is most certainly not like something like GWT.

The Dojo Core is also (as of 1.3) providing methods like create that gives you the programmatic ability to inject HTML into a document; still, this is not the same as taking care of everything for you.

Hope that helps.

When Dojo first started showing up I watched a presentation here on Ajaxian given by one of the Dojo leads. About ten or 15 minutes in he said something along the lines of “Dojo was built so that you don’t have to know HTML to create websites.” I stopped the presentation right there and wrote Dojo off forever.

I would like to know what presentation you are talking about; at no point should anyone at Dojo be talking about the idea that we build the HTML for you. We don’t believe in that approach any more than you do.

What we *do* believe in is making sure our tools provide you, the developer, with the most power and flexibility possible along with making sure what we give you satisfies all our requirements (including i18n and a11y).

For the record also (since it drives me nuts sometimes), what the comparison is doing here is for Dijit. Dijit is built on top of the Dojo Core but it is NOT Dojo. (Had to get that off my chest).

WRT to whoever posted that link to ExtJS’s chart stuff–is there somewhere else you can see the capabilities? The link you posted contains almost all the inherited props and has almost nothing about what you can actually do with those charts.

Finally, WRT to the many links to Indeed, I’ll give you another one:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=dojo%2C+yui%2C+gwt%2C+ext+js%2C+jquery%2C+mootools%2C+prototype&l=60188&relative=1

All the previous links were in absolute numbers but it’s instructive to watch the growth of the trends as well.

As for the upgrade cycle … that’s very typical for pretty much every commercial developer tool. If you’re not taking into account upgrade cost in your evaluation of possible toolkits, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Did you read this post : http://extisevil.blogspot.com/2009/04/ext-ceo-ape-alias-spreads-more-fud.html

Moreover, Ext releases new major versions even when minor additions have been added. The have major version upgrades more frequent than any other library available. They do this to keep milking users of upgrade costs. Ext 1.1 -> Ext 2.1 –> Ext 3. I’m sure we’ll have an Ext 4 branch in a couple of months. So users, please be aware of the hidden costs involved before considering Ext. The cost is not *just* of a single license. Ext fanboys can flame me now, but will understand what’s going after some time. There is a very nasty patten and ugly history.

2) Let’s not argue about what is the best Framwork. This surly is a matter of tase. Matt Raible is just trying to help people in finding the right Framework. I think his evaluation of ExtJS is way off. In mine ExtJS would do much better then Dojo and YUI. So let’s hope people will make up there own minds and not use the pregiven evaluation of his.

First he insults two people for their valid opinions. That’s just a sad attitude to have.

Don’t like the licensing of Ext? Then don’t use it, but don’t downplay it’s usefulness for some people.

jQuery isn’t as advanced and complicated as you like? Then don’t use it, but insulting people who do is a very poor attitude.

Mootools? Same as my jQuery thought above.

Then we get to the truth, gavin is just a fanboy for dojo. Which is funny because he just put himself in the same league as the mootools fanboys he just complained about.

Everyone should just try several frameworks to find the one that fits their needs the best for their project, be it a low-end web page project for the local candle maker or Gavin’s high-end projects.

@Chiper – as you stated, your experience isn’t very diverse, so it’s understandable that you make incorrect judgements.

ExtJS widgets/User interface is fantastic. But as a framework/toolkit, it is immediately ruled out entirely, because its licensing is a joke. Unacceptable.

jQuery is good for beginners and light/small/basic web pages. It’s good for programmers who aren’t very good with web development.

Mootools – we all know about mootools ;) not really in the same league. The only reason anyone knows the name is the young children geeks spamming the toolkit in every forum. Again, good for people who aren’t very good at high end web develompent.

Dojo is the best most scalable toolkit available.

We switched from a home-rolled framework to ExtJS because it saves development time. While ExtJS does a few things a little differently than I would like, overall it is much quicker to develop in because most of the things we need are already there and are well-designed. The original front-end for our grid component took 3 months to develop, while porting it to ExtJS took 3 weeks, and one week of that was time spent learning the ins and outs of the ExtJS framework and grid component.

@fzametti: don’t be mad because java guys prefer GWT. It’s a valid point to prefer GWT, in their case. Development and deployment is easier for them because they can integrate with their java build tools.