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Ext JS 4.1 Final Released

| Don Griffin


It is with great pleasure that we announce the general availability of Ext JS 4.1 today. This release represents a significant improvement in the performance of Ext JS 4, with several new features and numerous other enhancements. We’re also grateful to the community members who helped us with bug reports, forum posts, emails, tweets, and field testing on production applications to make this a huge step forward in making Ext JS the Best JS Framework!

Why don’t you try the EXT JS 4 to see the changes and gain new software experience? Read the Ext JS 4.1 Upgrade Guide Documentation.

Performance

This release focused primarily on improving the performance of the rendering and layout processes. On our test applications and community-contributed tests, we’re seeing anywhere from a 30% to a 100% improvement in end-to-end display time. The new bulk rendering mechanism allows us to render the right markup initially and avoid expensive manipulations of the resulting DOM elements. The new layout engine is designed to minimize the number of costly browser reflows required to layout components and containers.

While many other, smaller, optimizations made it into this release as well, the focus of the release was on layout and DOM performance optimizations. We’ll continue working on further performance improvements in subsequent releases, and we’re always open to your input in the forums to see what areas you think need our attention next.

Grid

The return of native scrolling for grids has been covered previously, so I won’t go into that further. The many improvements to infinite/buffered scrolling will be great news for applications with large data sets. For grids that use the “locking” feature, many other features now work properly on the locked and unlocked sides of the grid.

Layouts

Most of the work on layouts has been to make them faster by avoiding browser reflows. In the process, however, most layouts benefited from the refactor in other ways. Most notably, the “border” layout’s new features have been covered previously. In addition, the width shrink-wrapping that used to be handled by specialized components (e.g., tooltip or menu) is now properly handled by the core layouts. Not only did this change make those use-cases much more efficient (by avoiding repeated layouts), but now this functionality is more generally available in your applications.

Core

There have also been significant improvements in XTemplates and overrides. Much of this has been covered before; however, Ext.override has also gained a new bit of useful functionality: it can now override instance methods (e.g., on a singleton), allowing the overridden methods to be called using the standard callParent method.

Another handy addition to event listeners is that the use of method names (rather than function references) is now supported. For example:

listeners: {
    click: 'onClick',
    change: 'onChange',
    scope: someObject
}

In previous versions, the above would have looked like this (which is, of course, still valid):

listeners: {
    click: someObject.onClick,
    change: someObject.onChange,
    scope: someObject
}

The use of method names gives better diagnostic messages in development mode for missing methods.

Tooling

We’re also excited to release alongside Ext JS 4.1 the new release of the SDK Tools, Beta 3. The new version of the SDK Tools is required to generate images for custom themes using Ext JS 4.1. This same version of the SDK Tools is also compatible with the latest release of Sencha Touch 2.

Included in the example folder of the Ext JS 4.1 download is a web page-based tool called the Page Analyzer. This has been covered as well, but its use is highly recommended to get the best performance out of Ext JS 4.1. It is also invaluable for diagnosing layout problems.

Docs and Guides

Of course, the documentation center has been updated to use Ext JS 4.1! In addition, there is new content important for moving to the new release. There is a new Optimization Guide based on the related blog post and a webinar. Reference it for the latest advice on tuning your applications for best performance. There is also an Upgrade Guide covering the API changes that will likely impact your move to Ext JS 4.1.

Conclusion

Ext JS 4.1 brings significant improvement to your applications, and we are investing heavily in exceeding our customer’s usability and performance expectations.

We want to take this moment to reiterate our commitment to our customers on various versions of Ext JS. We blogged about extending support of Ext JS 3 for 12 months beyond the next major release after Ext JS 4, and support subscribers will continue to receive patch updates for Ext JS 3.4.x, including support for IE 10.

We are very excited about Ext JS 4.1 and are looking forward to your feedback. Go to the forum and let us and the rest of the community know about your experience with Ext JS 4.1!

Ext JS 4.1 Upgrade Guide

Check Out Here Ext JS Latest Release

Comments

  3. Rafael Franco says

    Good news! Can we have a comparison of speed between 4.1 and 3.4 for Internet Explorer? Is it now faster, or still slower?

    Good work!

    Reply

  6. Drew says

    And how much did the API and CSS patterns change *again* between 4.0.7 and 4.1? Have you documented the differences?

    Reply

  7. Ulrik Mueller says

    great news… will be looking forward to continue with migration to 4.1.
    When do you expect Sencha Architect to support 4.1 projects (instead of 4.0.x) ?

    Reply

  8. Sylvain Filteau says

    I was looking forward to see this release since I’ve seen it at SenchaCon 2011.

    I want to know a question though : what about the Neptune theme, is it finished ? Is it working in all browser ?

    Reply

  11. Rodolfo Barriga says

    Great news :-)

    “#Sylvain Filteau ….. what about the Neptune theme, is it finished ?….. ”
    + 1 good question…. so, the Neptune theme its done ??!! will be done someday… ??!!

    Best,

    Reply

  12. Pavel Kurnosov says

    Thank you! You are awesome! So many read and watch about it, can’t wait to try. This is will be the very long night :)

    Reply

  13. Don Griffin says

    Neptune is still in “preview” status and is WebKit only at the moment. We opted to not remove it from the distribution because, even in its limited form, some in the community have found it sufficient for their purposes (possibly with some modifications of their own).

    Reply

  17. Masum says

    Many many thanks to Sencha team. It is a brilliant job. Now we need a modeling & code generation tool with Sencha Architect. So that we can scaffold easily and save more development time.

    Reply

  19. Nigel Dahl says

    Don, Nige and team – great work. This was always about doing it right, rather than doing it fast, which accords with our own philosophy. Now we can be confident in looking to move our production solution from 3.x to 4.1 with all the many benefits that this will give us. Look forward to celebrating this and much else in London next week!

    Reply

  21. Richard Walker says

    A repeatedly stated major goal has been performance…and the target is to be faster than 3.4. Sencha, surely you must be measuring your progress against this goal so please tell us the results. Your lack of response (this was the very first comment to this blog) makes it difficult to not be concerned. Thanks.

    Reply

  24. Doug Bieber says

    Yeah, most of the samples don’t work whether I’m using a webkit browser or not. IE 8 is totally broke. Running some of our production code against 4.1 GA in IE 8 shows that instances where a class extends a window and puts components directly in that window fails to layout (whereas it had prior). However, placing a panel in a window then placing the components in that panel does work for the default layout. This is minor compared to the examples fail, however. I think we’ll put this cheese on the shelf and let it grow some mold first.

    Here’s a toast to EXTJS 4.1.1 GA.

    Reply

  28. Geek0r says

    @Doug Bieber: This release seems a bit “rushed”. The issues in sum make it look kinda unfinished … I’ll wait for 4.1.1!