If anyone’s worried about longevity, buy a developers licence, I will be …

The LGPL allows you to use the library unaltered in a proprietary product without that product being swallowed by the license. If you alter the library (and you ARE allowed to alter the library and the source for the library MUST be public) then your alterations are covered by the LGPL.

The article doesn’t claim that LGPL means you can’t alter the library. It makes the claim that open source developers that license their libraries under LGPL are traitors to the FOSS movement. It says that people who develop open source libraries *shouldn’t allow* other people to use their libraries unless those people are willing to license their code under the GPL. It only works if you believe that developers shouldn’t have the right to keep their own applications proprietary at all.

Anybody can alter their own copy of Ext and redistribute it. Anybody can become an Ext developer. True, not just anybody can merge new code into the Ext SVN, but most people also can’t just merge code to the Linux kernel or KDE or most other open source projects.

“Is that what Ajax is for? Is that an interesting point of view for the emerging market of online apps?”

Dude, everyone is not building “emerging online apps.” In fact, a lot of people aren’t. A lot of people are building internal apps. A lot of people just want to view their database in a nice Ajax-y grid. Corporate and other businesses want to use Ajax for a variety of reasons, and also have a need to build apps productively. And if it looks good too, so much the better. That’s pretty much the goal of Ext. And your point is… ?

I don’t get it. I mean, I love 37signals’ work but what does one have to do with the other? Rails is a server side web application framework…saying it integrates with UI widget libraries is meaningless. So does PHP Cake, so does VB.NET, so does Python. Also, not everyone is in love with 37signals. Some folks think they keep a lot of things too simple- as in, not flexible/extensible – it’s a matter of taste and necessity. I think this whole discussion is one guy in a lab coat talking to all the troops in the trenches and telling them how things otta be.

You should realize that the two examples mentioned in this article (Portal and Web Desktop) are just prototypes–examples of what you can do in ext.

You can use Ext to create some unique interfaces–my favorite being the Django Book’s comment system, which is based directly off of Jack Slocum’s blog comment system. It’s a great way of getting feedback on not just an entire chapter, but single paragraphs. http://www.djangobook.com/en/beta/chapter01/

I’m not sure how this turned into a pissing match, but to judge a library based these super-examples is fairly narrow minded.

Re: the developers 7 years ago. They were very public. Quite. Open application developement platforms for building real applications, for the web, that loaded into a desktop environment. Word processors. Spreadsheets. Etc. I’m really rather shocked that you, obviously, haven’t studied the field you (claim) to work in, and make such absurd statements about the giants on whose shoulders you (and Ext) stand.

I’ll give you a starting point: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13848-page,1/article.html

They went on to be bought by IBM. And then went off to create OddPost. Which was bought by Yahoo.

How is Yahoo’s new mail doing against Gmail? It’s just like Outlook! I haven’t read any articles about how this “familiar” interface made people leave a *better* interface. Can you point me in the direction of the articles demonstrating how replicating Windows’ UI makes better online sofware possible?

You, and others, make this clearly wrong claim about “what users are used to”. The “web” doesn’t work like desktop apps do, its history is quite different, and therefore, if you are building online apps that you want to be “familiar”, you *don’t* use Windows.

Perhaps what you’re really saying is that “when a company wants to have an online version of the desktop apps they currently use they prefer to see a familiar (in this particular case) interface”. Of course. If that’s what you’re doing. Is that what Ajax is for? Is that an interesting point of view for the emerging market of online apps?

** If I’m a person who is an investor in startups do I think that my best chance of growth is to stake the future of my investors and partners on my ability to make online applications that seek to replicate, and then erode, the market share of Microsoft Office?

Or do I make better software, do I improve the service, do I rethink and advance the field? Buzzword is, for example, a *better* word processor for those using software online. If they had been stupid enough to use Ext, they would not have succeeded, at all. But they sure would have had a prototype up in days, by gum! Unfortunately (um — for you) somebody taught them that working for years and years on making something innovative pays off — if you have the balls.

Clearly there is little faith in this community in the creative ability of developers. Ajaxian is becoming a place to warehouse cheap-and-easy “solutions” that do little to advance the art, and a lot to relegate developers with potential to the wilderness of replication.

One more thing…. Ext JS is the chiznat!! Late….

Well architected to boot.

Nice work as a beta though and i must say its sexy as hell (much better looking than mine)

nice work guys

/Jester

Where in Ext’s documentation does it state that its purpose is to facilitate “aggregating content in a localized space?” That sounds like you trying to project something onto Ext which it doesn’t claim to be, and then tearing it down because you happen to be passionate about that problem space and believe Ext should be solving problems in it. You may as well criticize Microsoft Word because its spell checker doesn’t wash dishes.

Ext is a toolkit that helps developers build applications that look and work like desktop applications that their customers are already familiar with. That’s pretty much what it does. If that was being done 7 years ago, then these gurus of which you speak certainly didn’t share with the rest of the class.

Stifling creative interface development? Not really its goal to promote it (though arguably, the time you free up by not reinventing UI can be spent more creatively on your actual problem domain).

Now, my turn on the soapbox.

If you make a living building applications that you want people to be able to use intuitively, creative interfaces are, well, overrated.

Creative (read: non-standard) interfaces are great … if you’re an interface researcher … or a software company skilled and/or lucky enough to build interfaces that manage to be novel yet usable to your target audience. Not surprisingly, a lot of bleeding edge interface work is being done in photography, video, and design applications because, well, the target audiences are often as right-brained as the team that designs them and thus the learning curve is flatter for them than it would be for your average Microsoft Office user.

But for every Apple or Adobe (or flickr, on the web set), there are hundreds of “creative” people and companies who get novel interfaces pretty wrong – isn’t that why WIMP interfaces and CUA standards overtook one-off efforts almost 20 years ago? I.e. so people who couldn’t design interfaces could have a paradigm and palette of controls to reuse mindlessly? And so uncreative people could write memos, make presentations, and create spreadsheets without learning the DOS menuing system (or the custom control .DLL) of the week?

I’m not sure you’re being honest with me. Rather over the top, the “I’m staring at Tufte right now” stuff. And the — I hope I’m wrong here — claim that Tufte ‘champions’ the ‘design and UI paradigms’ that Ext allows a developer to implement — that is, the D+UI paradigms of current ‘Windows’ variants. I’ll encourage you to reconsider that reading of Tufte.

However, Tufte isn’t a web designer. My more subtle point was that information clutter is only continued by using the *bad* information display tools — those widgets Ext makes. And Ext certainly *is* a widget library. With an impressive amount of documentation. This is the complete list of tutorials for using Ext:

Advanced Custom Drag and Drop Part 1
Advanced Custom Drag and Drop Part 2
Application Layout for Beginners
Basics of Paging With the Grid Component
Beginners DataGrid Pt1
Beginners DataGrid Pt2
Beginners DataGrid Pt3
Beginners DataGrid Pt4
Beginners DataGrid Pt5
Beginning Using the Grid Component
Creating JSON Data in PHP
Custom Drag and Drop Part 1
Custom Drag and Drop Part 2
Custom Drag and Drop Part 3
Tutorials:Using Django Poll Tutorial with Ext
DomQuery v1.1 Basics
DomQuery v1.1 Advanced
Ext Menu Widget
Extending Ext Class
Getting Started with Forms
Getting Started with Templates
Jayrock with Ext
Loading Data Into and Submitting a Form
Dynamic Columns in a Grid
Using Ext Grid with Ruby on Rails
Using Ext grid form dialog to achieve paging list, create, edit, delete function
Using Layouts with Ext – Part 1
Utilizing Format Features of Templates
What is that Scope all about

This is a list of demos:

Dialogs
Hello World MessageBox and Progress Layout Dialog
Toolbar and Menus
Grid
Basic grid from array data Ajax XML data Paging and Remote Datasets Inline editing Existing Table to Grid
Form and ComboBox
Dynamic Forms XML Form ComboBoxes Live Search
Tree
Ajax + Drag and Drop Two Trees Ext Dependency Builder Photo Organizer w/ Tree
Layouts
Complex Layout Nested Layouts Feed Viewer
Resizable
Resizable Examples
TabPanel
Basic Tabs Advanced Tabs
Views
Image Chooser
Localization
Include a locale bundle
Debug Console

Which is pretty impressive. It is in fact the cleanest, most attractive imitation of existing desktop GUI theory around. When you have a client that wants to see a database dumped onto a desktop in either a form, or a list, or a tree, or an accordion, or a grid, and maybe wants squares on the screen to plug these lists of sortable text into, Ext is for you. No doubt. No argument.

But tell me again how Ext is something a serious developer should pay attention to when, say, the guys at 37Signals make better looking, better functioning applications which serve real customers doing significant tasks, and those dudes have gone and created a system called Rails which, with it’s lovely integration with other widget libraries, allows, well, superior products to be built?

It’s just an opinion, but you sound a lot like someone arguing for visual basic. It works and is easy. Absolutely.

http://www.desktop.com
http://www.mywebos.com

So I wonder how it is that a javascript framework that is about 7 years late (you all do realize much better developers made better frameworks than this years ago — *that actually did something*) is anything other than a basket of (very nice) widgets. Kudos, but let’s keep it real.

There are also several 2.0 web desktops that are equally nice, and equally dead. I’ll let you search around for these often funded and certainly doomed companies.

On the other hand, the *smart* people who want to create aggregations of content in a localized space (creating a desktop is only dealing with sorting lots of content on top of other bunches of content) are those who are doing things like:

http://www.pageflakes.com
http://www.netvibes.com

Which, you will notice, is more about building innovative apps congruent with the medium in which it operates. And those are just two examples. Not to put too fine a point on it: google maps has done more for developers than Ext could ever do — because it performs a useful function which contains it’s own, smart, interface, and does not simply promote the copying skills of some group or other of scripters.

Here’s an idea: how a “desktop” that aggregates all of a user’s content across all of the sites they have joined, organizes the information smartly (read: NOT IN WINDOWS), intelligently counterpoints data-with-data (read: Tufte. Seriously. Read Tufte.) and leaves the interface to provide useful *meta-functions* which *assist* the user.

That’s the kind of stuff those guys who have been there, done that, are doing, now, while you praise creativity-destroying frameworks. Hope Ext gets as big as google, because all this energy is being wasted…

I went to http://extjs.com/download and grabbed the latest 2.0 beta zip file, went into the source dir and was presented with the complete unobfuscated source code for the entire framework.