Sencha Company Update

Our big news this month is that we’ve successfully shipped two major product upgrades in the last few weeks, including Sencha Architect 2 and Ext JS 4.1. Congratulations both to the product teams and to the community members whose input into each of these releases was invaluable.

The goal with Architect 2 was to vastly improve on the capabilities and user experience of Ext Designer 1.0, and to build something that both new and experienced Ext JS and Touch developers would enjoy using. We spent a lot of time on real world user testing and feel like we’ve cracked the nut on a large number of workflows.

While Ext JS 4.1 may be a minor release, it contains a major rewrite of the layout and rendering systems to improve performance on older IE browsers. Dramatically improved performance was your number one request for Ext JS, and we’re pleased to deliver that in Ext JS 4.1.

We’ve also been busy on our partnerships. We announced a partnership with SAP at the beginning of April. We’ll be working on improved integration between Sencha Touch apps and the Sybase Unwired Platform. We’re seeing a huge amount of interest in better tools for managing Sencha Touch business applications, and you’ll be seeing us build more partnerships for this in the future.

We’ve also been welcoming the many folks who are moving from the Flex platform to HTML5. We’ve been trying to make the switch easy for you, with guides to help you switch from ActionScript to JavaScript, and to outline the parallels between Flex components and Sencha components. We’ll be doing more to ease migration going forward, including a SOAP/AMF connector for the frameworks.

Lastly, we’re continuing to build out partnerships with development agencies and systems integrators large and small. We’re seeing a substantial increase in hourly rates for Sencha developers. Please remember to get in touch with us if your organization is interested in building a Sencha practice: we have lots of referrals for you!

In summary, we’re busy building a bigger better airplane for you while flying at 600mph. I want to thank you for your continuing support of Sencha and for your invaluable contributions to the community. Keep forum posting, blog commenting, user extension making and application creating; and don’t be shy about letting us know how we can do a better job providing tools for you to create awesome applications.