Creates Sencha Labs to Support Non-Commercial Projects
Palo Alto, Calif. June 15, 2010 — Ext JS, the industry leader in enterprise JavaScript development, announced today that it has joined forces with the JQTouch and Raphaël projects to form a new company: Sencha Inc. The development leads for these projects also join Sencha as full-time employees. The new name reflects the diversity of open-source and dual-licensed projects under the new company’s portfolio of advanced software development tools and frameworks. The company has launched a new website, https://www.sencha.com. Effective immediately, all business activity will be conducted using the new name.
“Our transformation to Sencha marks a significant milestone for the company. Ext JS was centered on extending JavaScript in new ways to provide user experiences to match those offered by native desktop apps,” said Abe Elias, founder and CEO of Ext JS. “However, with the explosion of touch-based devices, and the emergence of the browser as a powerful graphics platform, it became obvious to us that a combination of the leading enterprise JavaScript framework, the leading Ajax mobile framework, and the leading SVG library would be a transformative event, enabling all of us to take web-standards-based application development to new levels.”
Formation of Sencha Labs
jQTouch and Raphaël now become projects supported by Sencha Labs, a foundation to support non-commercial projects affiliated with Sencha. These projects will have repositories hosted on a community-accessible code hosting service, with a maintainer funded by Sencha. All Sencha Labs foundation projects, including jQTouch and Raphaël, will continue to be available at no cost under the MIT open-source license.
“I’m extremely excited to be working with Sencha on the next generation of application frameworks,” said David Kaneda, creative director for Sencha. “And I’m thrilled that the company has embraced my open-source projects. Sencha Labs is now funding a dedicated maintainer to continue enhancing and supporting jQTouch and the fantastic community that has grown around it.”
“Combining with the Ext JS team to form Sencha, is a huge opportunity for me to advance the state of the art in web graphics,” said Dmitry Baranovskiy, software architect at Sencha. “I’m also very happy that Raphaël will become a fully maintained, MIT-licensed project under Sencha Labs.”
The Sencha product suite now includes:
- Ext JS for web developers – for quickly building rich, sustainable web applications for desktop browsers;
- Ext GWT for Java developers – enables Java developers to build rich user experiences leveraging the Google Web Toolkit compiler;
- Ext Designer – for easily assembling user interfaces using drag-and-drop functionality.
The Sencha Labs projects include:
- jQTouch – a progressive enhancement style, mobile library providing lightweight animation and UI plugin for JQuery;
- Raphaël – a rich SVG library for developing vector graphics applications on the web;
- Connect: – an application framework that combines Rack and Node.js to provide a lean, event-driven application server.
