Sencha Touch and EXTjs

[lorezyra]

Why do you guys have two major branches of these frameworks?

Why not have EXTjs made intelligent enough to distinguish from a mobile device and a 'desktop' PC?

I've observed that Touch was developed with the MVC architecture before it was brought into ExtJs. Then after EXTjs was revamped, you started bringing the "new" elements (e.g. Charts) into Touch. I can easily foresee this yo-yo effect continuing as these frameworks continue to diverge.

So, my question remains... Why not have ExtJS perform everything that Touch has to offer on a mobile device? Why not consolidate these two into one. They are practically accomplishing the same results: delivering top-level user interfaces on different devices (regardless if mobile or desktop).

Looking forward, I can see more and more desktops becoming touch based interfaces. Windows 7 already supports this and I believe the Mac does too. As I currently understand ExtJS 4.x, it does not support Touch based desktops... So, you have to augment Touch to perform the job.

[Hanni Sullivan]

Hi lorezyra,

this is certainly an interesting question. While I personally would like to see the same API in both ExtJS and Sencha Touch, I don't think it would be a good idea to merge them both.

One of my main concerns would be download size. ExtJS is compatible with all kind of browser down to the IE6 which increases it size considerably. Why would you want to force the end user to download code which is never going to be needed on his device? Sencha Touch only has to deal with WebKit browsers.

And ExtJS provides UI controls which you want need on mobile devices. Trees and grids and so on are simply not very usable on smaller screens.

Take a look at the Silverlight framework from Microsoft which is meant for web application and mobile devices, it only provides a reduced version of the .Net framework, which makes the download faster.

[lorezyra]

Okay, I can appreciate the excess code not required for mobile devices... What about the touch based desktops?

[Hanni Sullivan]

That is a question only a Sencha official can answer. I don't know, if Sencha is already focusing on them.

But I think it should be possible to develop a touch core component of the framework which could be included in both version. It would certainly help to streamline the API.