Advanced Gesture, Touch and Theming Capabilities Streamline Desktop and Mobile App Development in Single Framework
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., December 9, 2015 — Sencha, the company providing a unified platform for designing, developing, deploying and managing cross-platform web applications, today announced the general availability of Sencha GXT 4, a comprehensive Java framework for building feature-rich web applications. With the latest release of GXT, Sencha is introducing new tablet and touch screen laptop support to empower developers to easily build and extend desktop applications to tablet devices, with little or no modification to the existing application code base.
The transition from a mouse-and-click interface on desktop devices to a touch-based interaction on tablets and laptops has required companies to invest in significant re-development efforts and software engineering resources to optimize the user experience. With Sencha GXT 4 now providing support for touch and gestures at the core of the framework, Java developers can easily build and deploy rich, data-centric HTML5 applications for both desktops and tablets, and mobilize existing GXT applications.
“Twenty years in the making, the Java ecosystem is now stronger than ever,” said Gautam Agrawal, senior director of product management at Sencha. “By introducing tablet support, we’re building on that strength by enabling our developer community to easily deliver robust Java-based HTML5 applications on modern devices that provide the right user experience, on the right device, at the right time. The Sencha GXT 4 launch is another step in our commitment to power web applications that continue to drive enterprise mobilization.”
Sencha GXT features high-performance UI components that are interoperable with native GWT (formerly Google Web Toolkit) components. Components include HTML5 grids, trees, lists, forms, menus, toolbars, panels and windows. GXT 4 also introduces Triton, a new GXT theme that is optimized for the tablet application experience. Triton enables the use of a wider contact surface, suitable for fingertips on tablets.
Touch screen device support in GXT 4 includes:
- Gesture Recognizers – Gesture Recognizers combine browser touch events such as touchstart, touchmove and touchend, and synthesize them into gestures. GXT 4 implements ‘Gesture Recognizers’ to convert touch events into logical gestures such as double tap, and long press.
- Touch-Enabled Components – All of the out-of-the-box GXT components have been enhanced to respond to touch and gestures. In most cases, developers will not need to update their application code to take advantage of these features.
- Touch Scroller – Improves the browser scrolling experience on touch-sensitive devices.
Support for GWT 2.8 and Java 1.8 are now included. For more information, please visit: https://www.sencha.com/products/gxt/
