Considering Ext JS for your next project

Ext JS is a great library to create RIAs that require a lot of interactivity with the user. If you need complex components to manage your information, then Ext is your best option because it contains a lot of widgets such as the grid, forms, trees, panels, and a great data package and class system.

Ext JS is best suited for enterprise or intranet applications; it's a great tool to develop an entire CRM or ERP software solution. One of the more appealing examples is the Desktop sample (http://dev.sencha.com/ext/5.1.0/examples/desktop/index.html). It really looks and feels like a native application running in the browser. In some cases, this is an advantage because the users already know how to interact with the components and we can improve the user experience.

Ext JS 5 came out with a great tool to create themes and templates in a very simple way. The framework for creating themes is built on top of Compass and Sass, so we can modify some variables and properties and in a few minutes we can have a custom template for our Ext JS applications. If we want something more complex or unique, we can modify the original template to suit our needs. This might be more time-consuming depending on our experience with Compass and Sass.

Compass and Sass are extensions for CSS. We can use expressions, conditions, variables, mixins, and many more awesome things to generate well-formatted CSS. You can learn more about Compass on their website at http://compass-style.org/.

The new class system allows us to define classes incredibly easily. We can develop our application using the object-oriented programming paradigm and take advantage of the single and multiple inheritances. This is a great advantage because we can implement any of the available patterns such as MVC, MVVM, Observable, or any other. This will allow us to have a good code structure, which leads us to have easy access for maintenance.

Another thing to keep in mind is the growing community around the library; there are lots of people around the world that are working with Ext JS right now. You can even join the meeting groups that have local reunions frequently to share knowledge and experiences; I recommend you to look for a group in your city or create one.

The new loader system is a great way to load our modules or classes on demand. We can load only the modules and applications that the user needs just in time. This functionality allows us to bootstrap our application faster by loading only the minimal code for our application to work.

One more thing to keep in mind is the ability to prepare our code for deployment. We can compress and obfuscate our code for a production environment using the Sencha Cmd, a tool that we can run on our terminal to automatically analyze all the dependencies of our code and create packages.

Documentation is very important and Ext JS has great documentation, which is very descriptive with a lot of examples, videos, and sample code so that we can see it in action right on the documentation pages, and we can also read the comments from the community.