Sencha joined the IDERA team just about six weeks ago.
Since then, there have been a lot of upheaval and worry among the community. Unfortunately, the rumors you’ll find flying around on the internet right now are, at best, largely unsubstantiated and, at worst, actively malicious.
Will Ext JS be supported? When can new features for Ext JS be expected? What is the fate of GXT?
We’ve been hard at work diving into the roadmaps of each and every product – we’ve spent the last several weeks reviewing every product in the Sencha portfolio and comparing them with the forum feedback, error reports, and recent/open cases to try and develop cohesive, customer-centric roadmaps going forward. That being said, we are currently finalizing these roadmaps and reorienting ourselves to make sure we can deliver what our customers want and need more quickly and efficiently from here on out. In fact, we posted a high level overview of what we’re planning for our most popular products.
But there’s more, much more, beyond that initial peek into the future of Sencha. Detailed technical roadmaps will be forthcoming as we solidify the details, but in the meantime I wanted to share some more learnings and recurring themes we’ve come across in our discussions and interviews of engineers and customers alike.
Table of Contents
General Themes
Ease of Upgrades
As much as it’s reasonably possible, it’s important that we work to avoid breaking changes to APIs and the technology internals that force our customers to rewrite their applications. However, when such changes are inevitable, it’s key that we:
- Provide ample lead time to review with our customers and ensure that everyone understands the path forward and its role in the product roadmap.
- Provide extensive documentation and tooling around upgrading as seamlessly and painlessly as possible.
Improve Available Training
Training in Sencha products can be admittedly hard to come by. Because of this, new developers can have a difficult learning curve. It’s our responsibility to help create and maintain this content for use by the community.
Grow the Community
A healthy, vibrant community is key to the success of our products and our customers. As such, we are actively pursuing several efforts to attract new developers (through easier, less painful licensing processes for students and small dev shops), and nurture our existing community (through community engagement initiatives to tighten the loop between our clients and product roadmap).
More to come on each of these things in future posts.
GXT
As for GXT, it has not been abandoned – in fact, we are pushing ahead much more quickly than prior to the acquisition in order to show our support. We are currently finishing up development on many of the top reported bugs so we can begin QA on the next release. We don’t currently have a timeline on how long the QA iterations will take to reach the level of quality we expect, but the initial coding should likely be done in the next few weeks. That being said, you can expect a blog post on the next release as we look to move that code into QA.
Long term, we have some even more exciting plans incubating which would allow us to more fully support some of amazing Ext JS features in the GXT product. There will be more on that in official channels as it develops.
Sencha Test
In addition to some of the more technical requests for Sencha Test (e.g. cleaning up the Futures API), we’re also working on several more general initiatives to ensure that it is fully ready to be an integral component of any production development flow.
Cleaning up the UX
We’re keenly aware that sometimes it’s the small things that make all of the difference. The general user experience of Sencha Test can use a good coat of polish to ensure that everything works how one would expect it to. Likewise, we want to iron out some of the small irritants that get in the way of streamlined workflow.
Improving the Documentation
We’ve been moving so fast on Sencha Test that sometimes the documentation hasn’t kept up with the latest and greatest that the product has to offer.
Forums
There have also been some issues around the forums – specifically concerning spam and lost support requests.
We’re working on the spam issue to bring things back under control. Things should hopefully be cleaned up in short order.
Support
As far as support is concerned, there are traditionally several channels which clients could use to reach out to us, so we are working to streamline the support methods to ensure that nothing gets lost in the shuffle. Currently, the best and most direct method to reach out to support is via your support portal.
Next Steps
Stay tuned for more updates, and – as always – feel free to reach out to us to share your questions, comments, and concerns.
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Robert, is it true that the entire development and support of Sencha products will be outsourced offshore? Are you planning to use any developers based in the USA.
does it matter? most of the services team have always been non-USA devs.
You don’t get to call “fake news” on a matter of record.
This reeks of desperation.
Not sure what is meant by unsubstantiated. The entire Ext JS development team was let go. If you feel like the Ext JS framework can be supported by offshore developers with no prior experience with Ext JS, then by all means, bet your future on it.
There is absolutely ZERO chance that they will be able to follow up on that road map and deliver quality new releases. Just take a look at the support that we are now getting from the offshore team. Ext JS is just too large and complex for a new team of people to come up to speed in a reasonable amount of time.
Sencha is removing some comments because they don’t want to hear the truth and have their illusions destroyed.
i get why they let go the whole team, it was a culture change.
as for telling people to use ‘support portal’ in a community instead of an open forum is a bit crazy, since day one we’ve used the forum, now there’s a slack channel for fast support, the support portal is last resort in the Sencha ecosystem.
Instead of talking about malicious and unsubstantiated rumors, you guys should get to work fast. Support is appallingly incompetent. How can you even charge for this kind of support? The 5 plan which ruined popularity of Sencha’s products should have been removed on day one following the acquisition.
You keep digging don’t you?
Deleting all comments now when people have already seen them.
It’s as if you don’t know… well… anything.
to be honest I got sick of one person ranting, send them an email dude!
It’s not a good idea to introduce yourself to the community beginning with wacky accusations of unsubstantiated and malicious rumors. None of this has any correlation with reality.
Do you plan to update ExtReact? This product looks to be unsupported.
Please delete this
Please go ahead and delete this comment, like all the other comments you are shamefully deleting…
The new broom sweeps clean.
Can we see somewhere who exactly is “Robert Warmack”. There doesn’t seem to be any matching linkedin profiles. What was he up to before joining Sencha? What are his accomplishments?
It would be also interesting to find out who else will be working on new Sencha releases from now on.
IDERA is an IP acquisition company, not a software company. They will try to outsource the entire development to offshore places at a cost of between $5 to $20 per hour because this is their model. Time will tell if this is going to work, but so far the early signs are not encouraging. Just take a look at the outsourced Sencha support.
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IDERA is an IP acquisition company, not a software company. They will try to outsource the entire development to offshore places at a cost of between $5 to $20 per hour because this is their model. Time will tell if this is going to work, but so far the early signs are not encouraging. Just take a look at the outsourced Sencha support.
What happened to Company page on the site? It used to say who was in charge and calling the shots and doing the real work. Now it’s just another headless company which obviously doesn’t instill a lot of faith in the community.
They “let go” so many people, that they don’t have anyone to put there anymore.
https://www.sencha.com/company/team/
The “Team” page is there, but is just not true. Omnishambles.
https://www.sencha.com/company/
https://www.sencha.com/company/team/
What happened to Sencha support portal ?
Claudia, what issue(s) do you see?
Hi,
I was unabled to access my tickets on sencha.support.com but
this week the page has been back up.
How do you plan to release updates to the framework when you’ve fired the entire dev team?
This isn’t a malicious rumor; this has been confirmed by the devs you have fired:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6316923189536571392/
Do you really hope for some offshore team to pick this up in any meaningful way?
Sencha has some very complex products and it’s not easy to find qualified people to do this type of work. My understanding is that the entire Sencha tech staff will be outsourced.
Even if a suitable replacement team is found, it will take a very long time for them to come up to pace. I’m probably not the only one who is scratching his head and wondering how this is supposed to work…
Who is moderating this blog?
Why delete the link? Are you hiding something?
https://www.sencha.com/company/team/
You guys really don’t “get” GXT then, if you seriously think that you can incorporate ExtJS into the mix. There are fundamental compatibility differences between the two and extjs will NOT work inside of GWT. Good luck.
I can understand your concern with GXT and Ext JS integration. I have had the same concern when integrating other Javascript apis with GWT. But what I have found when testing Ext JS features written in Java, turns out to be a great combination consuming another Javascript API. So while both APIs have different architectures I’ve found they can blend together quite well. For instance, let’s say I want to add the rich Ext JS charts library with my GXT application, I could do this using JsInterop or JSNI. This is something I already do with the Google Maps api to get features quickly from another Javascript library. While architecture is different is constructed differently in Ext JS a JsInterop (wrapper) can make easy work of writing Ext JS charts with Java. Of course the construction will be different than a standard widget construction, it’s easy none the less to consume the Javascript library using JsInterop. So essentially while both architectures are different, it’s quite easy to integrate the libraries with out compatibility problems. That said there are more details I could cover in this and if you like I would be glad to help address your concerns. In the mean time, I think it would be quite exciting to think about adding features like the Ext JS charts, pivot grid, calendar, and other Ext JS features. And be able to write those quickly in Java. Feel free to reach out to me anytime and I can cover more of the nitty gritty details of how you can use JsInterop and or JSNI with other Javascript libraries.
Can we get a confirmation from the mgt team that infact the core dev team is gone and that offshoring is the direction the company is pursuing . If so, save yourself a ton of money and forget it. The market has already spoken and is moving on to other frameworks. The Lic. scheme started the slow death years ago and trying to offshore this will certainly be the final nail. So again I ask the Mgt Team, is core development going to be offshored? And was the core dev team fired? We have a right to know the direction the company is heading. Opensource this great product. Get out of the way, and sell support, maybe prem. components. But decide quickly, this product is dying, almost dead.
Historically, most acquisitions are failures. I don’t think that this acquisition will be any different based on what we have been seeing so far.
I’m bothered that over two months passed and there has been no real update.
Bizarrely IDERA still keeps the uncompetitive 5 pack purchase requirement which destroyed popularity of Sencha products.
Oh cget me on DB!
It’s not a secret. They fired the team. They’ve outsourced to people who know nothing.