Sencha 2021 Roadmap Update

In this Sencha roadmap post, you will find a detailed summary of what we’ve planned for calendar year 2021.
The product team interacts with customers on an everyday basis. Your feedback plays a big role in driving our overall product direction!

2021 Roadmap Highlights

• Ext JS is King — Performance enhancements, New Grid features, Classic to modern parity features and more!
• Continued Innovation — WebTestIt, Ext.NET, and many more initiatives ahead.
• Strong Focus on Quality – GXT updates, Improved onboarding experience with new getting started resources and more!

Before we get to the details of our updated roadmap, we wanted to recap what we’ve delivered in recent months.

Recent Releases

7.3 Release

In September 2020, we released Ext JS 7.3. The 7.3 release was a quality focused release, addressing dozens of customer requests across the modern and classic toolkits. In addition to the quality improvements, we also added a template example to the Kitchen Sink and provided new embedded examples in API Docs to increase developer productivity. Shortly after the initial 7.3 release, we released ExtReact, ExtAngular and ExtWebComponents 7.3.

Key 7.3 features include: 

• Improvements to the Data Grid, Fields, Charts and Buttons widgets.
• Enhancements to Ext JS Grid scrolling experience.
• Many quality improvements addressing customer reported tickets. Check out the release notes for full details.
• New Kitchen Sink examples and directly usable ready-to-go templates for both toolkits.
• Over 30+ new fiddle examples in Ext JS API Docs
• Upgraded Froala WYSIWYG Editor to latest version 3.2.1.
• ExtReact, ExtAngular and ExtWebComponents for version 7.3

Sencha WebTestIt

In October, we introduced a new product to Sencha’s family of products, WebTestIt. Sencha WebTestIt is a free to use, lightweight IDE and toolset optimized for creating, building, executing, and debugging UI tests for websites and web applications.  WebTestIt provides users the tools to create and build tests with popular web testing frameworks such as Selenium and Protractor. Aimed at serving the broader web test automation ecosystem, WebTestIt significantly reduces the effort associated with test management and increases the efficiency of your project’s test automation.  We plan to continue to update WebTestIt on a semi-regular basis.

Download WebTestIt

Sencha Ext.NET

Sencha Ext.NET is a new product targeted toward the ASP.NET developer community. Sencha has partnered with the Ext.NET team to provide this offering through the Sencha line of products .Ext.NET is an advanced ASP.NET Core component framework that incorporates the Ext JS library to build cross-browser, blazing fast web applications. Ext.NET combines the two server and client side technologies (Ext JS & ASP.NET) to provide the UI controls for over 140 UI components including some amazing looking themes, and is available in three editions.

GXT 4.0.4

The Sencha team recently announced the availability of a GXT 4.0.4 software patch release for our customers on maintenance. This release addresses more than a dozen customer reported tickets spanning improvements in the grid component, layout, selection, and more. The release is available for customers from the Sencha support portal.

Looking ahead into Calendar Year 2021

What’s Planned for Ext JS

Continuous Performance Enhancements, New Grid Features for Sencha’s best-in-class component, Modern to Classic Parity Features & More.

Ext JS Classic and Modern toolkits are going to continue to be first class toolkits that will live long into the future. As you’ve seen with all of our Ext JS releases, we have a strong dedication to both the classic and modern toolkit. This is evident in both the quality work we’ve been doing in the 7.x releases so far, but also in what we have planned for 7.4, 7.5, 7.6 and beyond. 

If you are developing applications with Ext JS Classic toolkit, we have enhancements in the works planned for the coming releases, including new grid features in 7.4. If you are developing applications with the Ext JS Modern toolkit, we have both new features planned for existing components (such as new grid features in 7.4), and also numerous Ext JS modern to classic parity features. 

As you will see, we are going to continue to invest and innovate in further enhancing the current toolkits and leverage existing runtime to bring more value and options to our users. 

• With any of the upcoming releases, upgrade lifecycles will continue to be smooth and incremental.
• You can continue to use the Classic and Modern toolkits in your current and future projects—and build applications with the products you know and love. 
• Our popular Grid component will be enhanced with new features. New grid features, performance enhancements and quality improvements will continue to be our focus.  
• There will be a significant improvement in the overall ease of use, accessibility and quality of all the components in our toolkits. 
• Support for ExtReact, ExtAngular, and ExtWebComponents

Ext JS 7.4 Release 

The Sencha team is very excited about the upcoming 7.4 release, the biggest Sencha release in the last 12 months. For the Sencha Ext JS 7.4 release, targeted for Q1 CY2021, we plan to add some very exciting features to our best-in-class component, the grid, for both the classic and modern toolkit. The new grid features are in addition to numerous quality improvements we’ll be adding in 7.4. See the recent post that shows 7.4 features in action.

The 7.4 release will include the following new grid features:

• Multi-level grouping: Advanced multi-level grouping provides data grouping on multiple levels
• Grouping panel: Easily drag and drop columns for grouping
• Summaries for groups and total: Quickly define functions for aggregation such as sum, min, max count and more per column
• Filterbar: Quickly filter data in the grid using the new grid header filterbar container

Our current plan for Ext JS is to alternate between quality focused and feature focused releases. 

Ext JS 7.5

Quality Enhancements:

• Address top customer requests in Ext JS for Modern & Classic Toolkit, focused on grid and form improvements, open tooling and more.

Framework and Tooling Enhancements:

• Update FontAwesome version to latest 
• Update Froala version to latest 
• Ext-gen and ExtWebpack plugin enhancements

Internationalization

• Provide out-of-the-box localization support for new grid features introduced in 7.4

Ext JS 7.6

Quality

• Address top customer requests in Ext JS for Modern & Classic Toolkit

Grid Enhancements

• Focused on additional best-in-class improvements

Internationalization

• Locale specific package enhancements (expand built-in support for Modern to include more languages)

Ease of Use

• Make Coworkee a NPM based app and update to latest Ext JS version

Ext JS 7.7

Quality enhancements release:

• Address top customer requests in Ext JS for Modern & Classic Toolkit

Developer Productivity

Ext JS Modern to Ext JS Classic parity features:

• Add Multiselector grid component for Modern 
• Toast component Improvements for Modern
• Modern Dialog component enhancements

Ease of Use

• Additional templates and examples

Ext JS 7.8

Quality

Address top customer requests in Ext JS for Modern & Classic Toolkit

Developer Productivity

Ext JS Modern to Ext JS Classic parity features: 

• Add a dashboard component to the Modern Toolkit
• Support multi-apps workspace in ext-gen/Open Tooling apps

Ease of Use

• Additional templates and examples

We plan to continue with 7.x releases throughout CY2021, to make upgrades from version to version a seamless experience. We plan to share our plans for version 8 sometime later in CY 2021. 

Sencha Tooling 

In CY 2021, we plan to make a number of enhancements to both Sencha Cmd, and NPM, providing support for modern JavaScript and Java versions, CLI support and more. This is a theme we plan to carry through several product releases.

Sencha Cmd

Quality

• Better support for modern JavaScript versions, Java 11, CLI, and documentation

Npm

Quality

• Address CLI issues and support testing builds, package loading, and better theming.

Developer Productivity

• Add support for multi-app workspaces and shared packages using widely adopted tools.

GXT 

GXT is Sencha’s comprehensive Java framework for building web apps using the GWT (formerly Google Web Toolkit) compiler, allowing developers to write apps in Java & compile their code into highly optimized cross-platform HTML5 code. 

The GXT 4.0.4 release, released in early December, includes a number of quality improvements for customer reported issues. 

We’ve also been reviewing new feature requests from our GXT customers. The most requested are GWT 2.9 and Java 11 support. I am excited to announce that this is actively in the works, and something we plan to offer as a 4.1 release in early Q1 CY2021.

We’re also having discussions about future versions beyond 4.1, but don’t have anything specific to share on those yet. If there are specific features you would like to see added in GXT, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Sencha product management.

Sencha Test

Since the release of WebTestIt, we’ve received some questions from Sencha Test customers. We don’t have any plans to replace Sencha Test with WebTestIt. The two products will coexist.

WebTestIt is used to serve the broader non-extjs test automation ecosystem. It isn’t tied with apps built with Ext JS and can be used to test apps built with any framework (React, Angular etc.). 

We don’t have any specific plans to share on Sencha Test at this time, as our team is continuing to review requests. If there are specific features you would like to see added in Sencha Test, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Sencha product management.

Sencha Architect 

In case you missed it, our amazing community of global developers competed this summer in Mission: Open Architect, a hackathon dedicated toward the release of an Open Source version of Sencha Architect.

Many developers joined this mission to fuel open source and enterprise innovations by designing an Open Source Visual Editor that allows editing for application views, only one can claim the grand prize, and we declared a winner in August. 

Architect is a powerful visual tool, and we have many customers who have successfully built powerful applications with Architect.

We don’t have any plans for the Architect product to go away, or be discontinued. 

Our goal of the hackathon was to see what sort of open source deliverable we could receive back and then assess the future of Architect. We’re continuing to have discussions internally on Architect, to see what will provide the best experience for existing customers, and new Architect users in the future. One idea we’re discussing is a new version of Architect that provides a combined Architect and Themer experience, allowing users to easily create themes in Architect. 

We are also investigating what it would take to support Architect on the new Apple chipset in the future.  

Our goal is to continually listen to feedback and be transparent in our roadmap and plans. We are laser-focused on improving usability, performance and delivering quality products. 

What features would you like us to improve or add?

If you have any product feedback, please email the product team at: [email protected], [email protected]

Note: These plans and roadmap represent our intentions as of this date, but our development plans and priorities are subject to change. Accordingly, we can’t offer any commitments or other forms of assurance that we’ll ultimately release any or all of the described products on the schedule or in the order described, or at all. These general indications of development schedules or “product roadmaps” should not be interpreted or construed as any form of a commitment, and our customers’ rights to upgrades, updates, enhancements, and other maintenance releases will be set forth in the applicable software license agreement.