Jack,
I really hope you and your gang make tons of money off of extjs but the latest issue around the license is worrisome. I am currently licensed and have always asked my users to download extjs for themselves so the actually change should have little impact on me. I am more worried about the community and the growth of extjs adoption. I hope your license decision is tied to a larger strategy and not just about making more money in the short-term. Maybe I am dreaming, but I have always hoped that this library would migrate into the browser. Apple or Opera (or even MS) could bundle this library into a widget toolset. We developers would still write our javascript code using the extjs api. The optimizing browser would then sense the extjs api and run the widget toolkit in 'C' code. Any other browser would download the extjs library and run it as it is done now. We get faster running applications, the browser supplier gets a much better browser, Jack et. al. gets big money for their great API and hard work, and we get to stop worrying about licensing.
How come this hasn't happened already? There is so many people in this extjs community now couldn't we solve the technical issues? Doesn't somebody in this community know the 'right' people on the Safari team?
too many politics involved, would never happen. Although a good start would be if someone could make a firefox plugin, that would be cool, save having to wait all the time when looking at peoples demos and extensions
How do you mean 'too many politics'? It just takes the lead decision maker at one browser company to say 'buy it'. The rest of the browser suppliers are SOL until they put the funds up as well.
I don't see it happening either. Take for example jQuery the lead developer, John Resig also happens to be a Javascript evangelist at Mozilla Corporation. He may know the 'right' people but I don't see jQuery becoming part of Firefox anytime soon
Basically, you want wrappers from the ExtJS api with native windowing toolkits?
Imagine, writing non-updatable (for security reasons) hard-coded libraries, that have virtually no idea on what version you are aiming for. Running a Ext 2.11 SVN release under a Ext 1.1 wrapper?
Much of what Ext does simply replaces/vastly improves standard HTML controls. If the browser vendors and standards bodies progressed fast enough, then Ext as a Widget Framework would be useless (probably still as a tiny jQuery-type js library). Then you would already have themable comboboxes, grids, sliders, border layouts, etc.
I had this idea once, to port Ext to either Canvas or SVG. Both are now quite powerful, and could easily make the library much much more portable. Firefox 3 also uses the Hardware-Accelerated Cairo toolkit for rendering, and Safari uses similar (Opera uses QT which probably does that too)... sadly, ie doesn't even have this, but VML is likely built ontop of DirectX. Also then it could be used in the es-operating-system project (see google code) which supports Canvas (and ecmascript, aka javascript).
Interesting that this is the only technical argument on the thread so far and I don't agree that it is dependency hell. I am not necessarily referring to wrapping native windowing toolkits. there could be a new toolkit built into the browser that provides grids, datastores, extjs forms etc. It may be best to make it a plugin so that it could be easily updated.
alert("this application requires safari_extjs_3.1 but you are running safari_extjs_2.9. Would you like to upgrade?")
You have to admit that it would just rock to have the extjs library already on the browser!
Originally Posted by antimatter15
Dependency Hell...
Basically, you want wrappers from the ExtJS api with native windowing toolkits?
Imagine, writing non-updatable (for security reasons) hard-coded libraries, that have virtually no idea on what version you are aiming for. Running a Ext 2.11 SVN release under a Ext 1.1 wrapper?
Much of what Ext does simply replaces/vastly improves standard HTML controls. If the browser vendors and standards bodies progressed fast enough, then Ext as a Widget Framework would be useless (probably still as a tiny jQuery-type js library). Then you would already have themable comboboxes, grids, sliders, border layouts, etc.
I had this idea once, to port Ext to either Canvas or SVG. Both are now quite powerful, and could easily make the library much much more portable. Firefox 3 also uses the Hardware-Accelerated Cairo toolkit for rendering, and Safari uses similar (Opera uses QT which probably does that too)... sadly, ie doesn't even have this, but VML is likely built ontop of DirectX. Also then it could be used in the es-operating-system project (see google code) which supports Canvas (and ecmascript, aka javascript).
license worries - extjs built in the browser
Originally Posted by antimatter15
Reply With Quote
