How difficult it is to upgrade an exsting app from ExtJS 3.x to 4.x ?

[paquerette]

Hi,

does anybody have some input on how it's difficult to upgrade to 4.x from an 3.x application ?

This is aspect of the 4.x release is forgotten in the marketing release, which make me think that it will be difficult... (otherwise, I think the commercial team of sencha would have stressed out the fact it's so easy to upgrade).

Paquerette.

[tobiu]

http://www.sencha.com/forum/showthre...to-4-Migration

a migration guide is coming soon and a compatibility file as well.

BUT if you want to use the advantages of ext 4 like MVC, ext.application etc. this will be a lot of work.

Also keep in mind custom components, plugins and UX, that are based on Ext 3.


best regards
tobiu

[stevil]

From what I've seen so far in Ext 4, I think the following about compatibility layers:

1. They're a crutch that should be discarded as soon as practical (which unfortunately in deployed applications, can be a LONG time). They prevent you from having to think in terms of the new framework's paradigms.
2. I'm not convinced that such a layer will work well for all but the most basic applications:
   1. Much extended code in 2 and 3 deals with markup - and that's changed in two ways - one for modern browsers, one for "less modern" browsers
   2. I'd love to see how TreeNodeUI would manifest itself in a compatibility layer
3. Given that such a layer CAN'T cover everything (nor would I expect it to), a developer will then spend their time bouncing between 3.X and 4.X docs trying to make sense of the universe.
4. Subsequent refactorings will then need to make it into the compatibility layer. What's the time frame of that, and does it slow the overall release process?

I'm not telling sencha they shouldn't do it at all - there's certainly a subset of the market that can use it - I just have a feeling that that subset is smaller than they might think ("vast majority"?).

So with that said, I think you need to roll up your sleeves and dig in. The doc, as improved as it will be (and already is), will still not be enough at release date - it never is for any product.

Scale of 1 to 10, I'll say 6 to 7 - harder than average, but not daunting.

stevil

[paquerette]

Thanks for your replies!

It's good that there is a migration guide.

Of course, I don't see how can a big app would easily migrate to the new MVC model... nothing is magic.

But I hope the Ext3.x code will still work.

That said, if I use a deprecated method, would it be printed in console logs ?

Thomas.

[stevil]

Thanks for your replies!
That said, if I use a deprecated method, would it be printed in console logs ?

I"m not sure about that - but I do know that Errors are now raised (separate from Javascript exceptions) when you attempt to create objects without supplying required configs in some cases.

stevil