Last week, we announced the release of Sencha Ext JS framework 6.5.2 and Sencha Cmd 6.5.2. These releases include hundreds of minor improvements and bug fixes in both of the Ext JS modern and classic toolkits. We are currently working on developing Ext JS 6.5.3 that will include many customer requested bug fixes and improvements in the Modern toolkit.
Since Sencha became part of the IDERA family, we’ve received a number of customer and community requests to clarify product progressions and roadmap. We continue to welcome your requests for product enhancements on blogs, surveys, emails, roadshows, forums, customer calls, as well as product user testing. Many of you are also providing detailed feature requests using the Sencha Forum on Ext JS Feature requests.
Based on your feedback, we are building a comprehensive and detailed roadmap. We’ve shared some of the key roadmap themes below:
Table of Contents
Bring Modern toolkit to parity compared to classic toolkit
Many Sencha customers are embracing the modern toolkit as a way of creating a single code base that serves multiple devices and platforms – from desktops, tablets to smartphones. Sencha’s modern toolkit supports creating performant applications with a responsive and adaptive user interface that looks great on all modern browsers. We have received great feedback about the Employee Directory application that we released a few months back with the Ext JS 6.5 release. However, there are certain features in classic toolkit that are not supported in modern toolkit, such as grid filtering and a locking grid. Many of you are requesting we bring component feature parity to modern toolkit along with additional enhancements of accessibility and localization support.
Support Modern Dev Toolchains
For most Sencha developers, Sencha Cmd provides a single cross-platform command line tool that helps with most development tasks – from creating starter apps to compiling and building complete applications. Over the last few years, we have seen rapid changes in modern JavaScript tooling. The NPM registry has become the largest software registry in the world with half a million packages of free and reusable code. Many of our customers are making use of these modular NPM packages to assemble new projects quickly. Along with NPM, many other tools such as webpack and babel are becoming common in the JavaScript community. Sencha already provides support for modern tooling with our ExtReact product, and we’ve heard the requests for similar support from our ExtJS customers.
Full Support for new JavaScript language specifications
ECMAScript 2015 or ES6 was the largest upgrade to JavaScript since its creation. Since ES6, there have been yearly updates to the ECMAScript specifications. This helps you develop applications with powerful new syntax for JavaScript classes and modules along with arrow functions, default parameters, spread operator, and more. Additionally, ExtJS 6.5.2 with Cmd 6.5.2 provide support for many ECMAScript 2017 features by making use of the updated Google closure compiler. We have heard the customer requests for full support of the latest ECMAScript standards with support for ES6 Class and ES6 Modules system.
Enhance Ext JS Tooling with updates to Architect and Themer
Sencha Architect continues to be a comprehensive visual builder that is used by many ExtJS developers. We have heard the customer requests to update Architect and remove its dependency on metadata information. Similarly, Themer is a comprehensive theming tool and ExtJS customers are requesting better integration between Themer and Architect to create a better, faster end-to-end development workflow.
Enhance ExtReact with support for new React framework versions
ExtReact is a relatively new product compared to ExtJS; it provides React developers with hundreds of ready to use powerful UI components from within the ExtJS framework. You can use tools such as Themer to theme apps built using ExtReact components. Our user testing from ExtReact trial users revealed that React developers are looking for an improved ExtReact trial experience, compatibility with latest React releases, and better adoption of React tooling.
Enhance Sencha Test to further improve QA team productivity
Sencha Test is a comprehensive testing tool used by Ext JS developers for creating unit tests, as well as QA engineers for creating functional automated tests. Sencha Test provides a set of Test APIs to target Ext JS components along with an event recorder and inspection capabilities. We currently have an early access version for Sencha Test 2.2 available for trial and feedback. Soon we will be releasing an update to the early access release that will address many enhancement requests from customers, and will include new features to improve the Inspection capability.
Next Steps: Take the Survey
We are thankful to you for providing generous product feedback that is used as a basis to create our product roadmap themes. We would like to invite you to continue to participate in the discussion so we can gain insight into your specific requirements and their criticality to your organization. Please complete the survey below to help us in collecting and organizing your feedback.
Take the Survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/32C6DN3
**Note: All features are not committed until the GA version is released and delivered.
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There’s hardly any support in the forum (excluding support from previous Sencha employees), and the forum is heavily polluted with spam.
Following the acquisition, not much has been done to increase popularity of Ext JS which has been declining for years. The uncompetitive “5 plan” should be removed if you want to stop and reverse this trend.
You guys write blog articles how great it’s to be an Ext JS developer, but the fact is there are hardly any any new opportunities for contractors with Ext JS skills. Very few new Ext JS projects are started compared to other JavaScript frameworks.
I’d like to know a couple things. When will be the next GPL licensed release? I ask because it seems you have stopped releasing GPL releases as any release in the 6.5 branch was not GPL which is a massive break in what has happened in the past. This looks like you will only have the commercial licensed release. If you aren’t going to have a GPL release, please be transparent and say so.
I’ld also like to know how you are going to accomplish this without an in-house dev team? I want to know because I have to make business decisions on whether or not to stay with Ext JS and I’d like a non-executive answer here. You don’t have an in-house dev team anymore which means you will have people outside the company bid on implementing this stuff but Ext JS isn’t a simple thing. You have to have deep knowledge of JavaScript, CSS, HTML, browser nuances, new tooling best practices and in my experience, the lowest bidder won’t be anywhere near the level of aptitude to implement this. I know, you’ll say something along the lines of “don’t worry, we will be able to accomplish this” but I very doubt this as anyone would. You’ve never addressed how you are going to maintain productive with furthering Ext JS among the other tools after the dev team was let go. We have to make business decisions on these risks and whether it’s a risk that is too risky. From where I sit, it’s way too risky.
They stated multiple time that the next GPL release will be 7.0 which might happen sometime next year.
I personally don’t believe Sencha can deliver a solid major release at this point without any experienced Sencha product developers and support staff.
Where? I do not see blogs from the new owners (Idera) or since the acquisition that state this. Can you point me to where Idera or a Sencha individual AFTER the acquisition has stated this? Also, this is a roadmap which would have been a great place to reaffirm their commitment to the GPL license or to a more permissive license. Personally don’t think it will happen but getting an answer since the acquisition is needed. Just because Sencha says something before the acquisition doesn’t mean Idera has to uphold that.
Where did they mention that they wont have in-house development anymore ?
Ex-employees did (not just ex-sencha people, embarcadero people too). Do a bit of research on Idera, it’s simple to see what their business model is. Cut costs by dumping expensive in-house coders for cheaper outsourced coders. And no… just because someone is an ex-employee doesn’t make them disgruntled where they would make up lies especially when the same “lie” keeps coming up.
Outsourcing is about lowering costs, not about improving quality.
I see that IDERA so far is keeping the same high Sencha prices and the uncompetitive 5 plan, but product support is not the same it used to be.
Yes, if there were not Evant, Animal and MitchellSimoens, the forum would be dead.
Thanks for keeping it alive.
I repeat – if there are limited developers specializing in ExtJS, there will be very limited clients and enterprises using ExtJS.
How do you fix that? Simple. Follow the structure set by MongoDB. Make ExtJS free. Charge for tooling and Support.
And take development to open. There are desolate bug fixes, improvements, and attempts at forks floating around github. That looks embarrassing. Imagine if invested community would actually help your (sencha’s / idera’s ) employees to do next development. It might even be cheaper with extra help.
And you would not need to guess what the clients want based on silly surveys. Just watch incoming pull requests and issue comments.
You are thinking one dimensional. Other people providing free coding is only part of it. You also have to manage the PRs coming in to ensure quality, code style, testing and making sure future plans (which thus far has been private) are adhered to and that would also take money.
As a contributor to Zend Framework I am aware.
Anything people need to know about GXT and its Roadmap?
Hi!
The blog only covers few roadmap themes. We do have GXT releases on the roadmap. If you haven’t already, pl. take the survey to help us understand specific requirements. Thx!
I would really want to see this roadmap and for some one to actually answer these questions.
Anybody from Idera?
Development 6.5.3 and the rest stands in place. Just look at the nightlies builds.
What is bad is that this framework has a lot going for it compared to angularjs and the roadmap to get into the npm ecosystem seemed very promising. Locking it down and charging high license fees (i.e. following the old enterprise model) is what killed the adoption of the framework. Selling to Idera was the last straw. The perception is that Idera is where old legacy technologies go to get milked for license fees. Rumors of key people leaving the company also doesn’t help. We are now having to scramble to get off the platform, as it was already difficult to find any developer interested in developing in Ext JS. Remaining on the platform would be like buying a blackberry at this point.
D, I believe you have a valid point/concern.
With the exception of current work on Ext JS 6.5.3, all development of Ext JS 6.6, Ext JS 7 and ExtReact appears to be halted at this time and there’s hardly any support in the Sencha forum.
We need to see solid evidence strongly suggesting that Sencha products will continue to be modernized and worked on including the Ext JS 6.6 and Ext JS 7 release.
>>> Selling to Idera was the last straw. The perception is that Idera is where old legacy technologies go to get milked for license fees.
I just spoke to a company which is still on Ext JS 3.4, and the first thing they told me is that they are planning to get off the Ext JS platform mostly because of their concerns about the IDERA acquisition. I was told they saw the writing on the wall.
I don’t think IDERA will be able to “milk” their customers for too long if they don’t plan to modernize Sencha products.
I’m reading all the comments on the blog and the forum, and I can feel that this aquisition released all the frustration accumulated over years.
It is even more true that most of you have high consideration for the Ext JS eco-system.
Let’s have a different approach…
Having the ideal components framework (grids, charts…) for web applications, something that can be compared to desktop components, is a kind of grail. Ext JS is ahead of the competition at the moment. Additionnally, the third party libraries the popular frameworks you mentioned needs to ‘kind of’ fulfill this requirement introduces real security issues the largest companies don’t want to face.
That said, it is just a matter of time, I would say months, competitors are putting huge efforts at the moment on that topic, we are talking about teams of more than a hundred developers.
Now let’s assess Sencha’s position in the competition, leaving in the past sunk costs (developers / customers lost due to this silly 5 licences strategy for example). They would have to more than double in size their staff, they would have to advertise more, to put more money on marketing and recruit more salespeople.
Sencha has been working with contractors very early on because it is extremely hard to hire people in the silicon valley. Additionnally, getting them up to speed takes time, enough time to see half of them finding a more ‘interesting’ job.
So, I guess they simply needed money, they needed to find additionnal or better investors.
So IDERA considered that Sencha was a good horse to put money on. I don’t know how much exactly but we can imagine semothing between 30 and 80 millions. You don’t spend this amount of money without a plan.
For an Ext JS developer like me, and probably for most of the customers, it is highly damaging not having feedbacks from IDERA about these plans and I personnaly believe that if they don’t communicate very quickly they are going to lose many of the current customers.
Normally IDERA should be scared by all those comments on the blog and the forum, and the normal reaction would have been to try calming down everyone, manage the crisis in other words.
So the question is, considering we are all humans after all, do they really care losing the current customers?
If you know that you are going to compete against Twitter, Google or Facebook, because this is the deal with Sencha, do really want to spend time and money to ‘reheat Sencha’s soup’, a business model that apparently didn’t work?
In other words, it is going to be a big bang and it is going to cause casualties to former customers.
And anyway, I would simply ask this question: do IDERA have any chance to take advantage of a discussion with people on the forum? This would have ended up as a fist-fight.
That said, as CURRENT developers, as CURRENT customers, what should we do now. We invested a lot in our current applications, it took time to train our staff, but this is ‘sunk costs’ again, they shouldn’t be taken into consideration.
However, rebuilding an app with another technology now, will take years and it is absolutely impossible to know what is going to be most adopted javascript technology at the time we finish the migration. It is so volatile at the moment that I personally only focus on the immediate ROI when I develop a new feature. I want to leverage my REAL competitive advantages. What is important is the time and the money I spend to have my app on the market, an app meeting my customers expectations. If Ext JS is offering that, nice. Customers don’t care, It departments do care because they think 10 years ahead. Customer’s think 1 – 3 years ahead max!
So as a conclusion, I would say, I’m carrying on with Ext JS because this is the framework I need to make money, I don’t care paying 5 licences or training staff, this is a drop in the ocean in the end when the cost of developing an app is several hundreds of thousands dollars.
My developer’s heart is dreaming of a revival of the LGLP licence, a product driven by the community, and a company that offers support and training, but the world is driven by money, not by developer’s dreams.
I wish success to IDERA, because the framework and the former developers diserve it, and I’m going to support IDERA because what they are (i guess) trying to do is extremely challenging.
PS: If anyone at Sencha / IDERA reads this, could you please fix my bug regarding key navigation accross checkcolumns :-)