Ask HN: Why is ExtJS not getting any traction?

As far as why it doesn't have traction, I would attribute this to 2 things. The first being that the JS community isn't really into app development. What I mean by that, is when you look at JS, and you look at languages like Flex and Silverlight, you notice a massive disconnect in ideas. In the JS world, visual components are rarely if ever first class citizens, simple layout tasks are far more difficult than they need to be, and SPA paradigms are also second class citizens. After noticing this and poking around, you find out that the main JS community either doesn't want the solution to begin with, or they seem to be re-inventing the wheel.

The second strike against ExtJS is the cost. I got a license for it a few years ago when I was delusional and thought I could use it to replace Flex. Dropping $1,000 on something when virtually every other tech out there is free is hard to choke down.

Also, it seemed like a major step down for those of us coming from the Flex community. Like I said, with JS app paradigms seem like afterthoughts and each peculiarity wore me down further and further. For instance, if you have a button and you declare a listener function but misspell it, you don't get an error complaining that the listener doesn't exist, you get a blank white screen. Another issue was marshalling data into objects. Whenever I brought back a Classroom JSON representation, the Student objects in the students collection remained unmarshalled. I had to use ANOTHER store to get those to behave as objects. All of these "why on earth is this acceptable" moments led me to believe such features weren't really in demand in the JS community if not resented altogether.

The licensing is pretty restrictive also and the prices are big.

I wouldn't say ext has no traction. I see sencha going pretty well and I've worked with extjs since the early days. It just looks more "business oriented"

It seems the ExtJS community has fallen off a bit as the company has (in my opinion) put it in the rear-view as they focus on Sencha and mobile. I also never really felt that I have seen what a true ExtJS app could be. The examples are the same as they were 5 years ago. Only the theme has been changed. You get a lot for free with the datagrid and charts but they aren't the only game in town for this.

No one wanted to build customer facing ExtJS apps because of performance issues, hard to style so that it doesn't look like some dull enterprise thing and at the time Rails was just getting popular. I havn't touched ExtJS in a while but building an admin CRUD in Rails would be much easier. The extra features of ExtJS can be gotten elsewhere and easily integrated.

Angular just seems like a breath of fresh air when comparing it to ExtJS, and again most of the components can be found elsewhere.

Never ever use it for a client who has any ambitions on GUI design. Figuring out how to put an extra pixel here or there can take hours...

If I want to manipulate the DOM or do AJAX I'll use JQuery, if I want to do data binding I'll use knockout.js, etc.

But these are minor annoyances compared to the huge ExtJS no-no for me which is the fact that ExtJS seem to actually hate Javascript. Or, they targeted the framework towards people who'd rather write C++ in the browser - giant "class" hierarchies everywhere. Ugh.

I've used Sencha's frameworks on 3 different projects now, and I still hate it. For many different reasons:

1. The learning curve: This is probably something you already know. But you may not be aware of is the other effects this can cause. If your team consists of members of different level of experience (from 0+), the code quality is going to suffer a lot from the lack of knowledge.

2. ExtJS and Sencha Touch are 2 different products. Today's web app demands to be runnable on many different platforms. With ExtJS you get point and click. With Sencha Touch you get swipe and pinch. But what if you're running it on a touch laptop that needs both point and click and swipe and pinch? I'm working on a product right now that integrated the 2. While we succeeded at reaching the goal, the result is not something I'm proud of.

3. Sencha is a walled garden that makes it hard to integrate other libraries into it. For the most part, Sencha already have a lot of things that you needed (like data grid, combo box, etc). But what if you want to do complex data visualization with d3? Complex interactive behavior with Rxjs? Or realtime updates with socket.io?

Eventually, I found out that no matter which framework you choose to use, you'll end up needing to read its source code to understand what's underneath. If you have to do so anyway, why not pick a framework that's simple to understand?

Could the app you want to write maybe lend itself well to the UI-stylings of Bootstrap? Or Pure? Or Foundation?

Or maybe you could combine something yourself... Googling Angular CRUD gives me this: http://angularjs-webapi-crud-grid.azurewebsites.net/

ExtJS is a great way to facilitate development when working with large data sets that involve (as you mentioned) CRUD utilities along with business validation constraints. With that being said, these kind of tools (And KendoUI too IMO) are being stuck inside intranet systems where the custom widgets and tools remain proprietary. No visibility == no hype.

I work exclusively on FE stacks and if the choice is Angular or any other top TODOMC* frameworks, typically that means the requirements don't fit well with ExtJS. Most JS-engine driven apps typically require a responsive implementation (cross platform is a big business trend), ability to incorporate a comprehensive design, and being able to do it within a reasonable amount of time (which is associated with budget).

ExtJS has a ton of overhead (especially browser performance and scalability in SPA sites), a large learning curve (IMO), and requires a ton of time to implement custom designs. This doesn't mean there aren't great tutorials or start kits, but its not something you can master within a week. Responsive support OOTB isn't there (KendoUI has solutions for this on their framework) and the only choice for reusable code for portable devices is an adaptive approach using Sencha Touch. This doesn't mean ExtJS is a bad choice, but typically ExtJS excels in desktop apps that are data driven with designs that were made for ExtJS (its rare to not recognize an Ext app if its built on Ext).

There's my two cents. I'm sure Sencha is going to destroy me if they ever read this.

Long answer:

1. The learning curve is really steep. I mean, really really steep. There's a critical shortage of (good) books, video, and tutorials on the web. I guess ExtJS' learning resources should be 0.1% of jQuery's. The examples on Sencha site were still using the 3 version last time I checked;

2. If you need to customize ExtJS, or need something slightly more sophisticated than CRUD screen, then you are pretty much on your own. You'll spend a large amount of time trying to "fight" the framework and your chances you succeeding are very low;

3. It's expensive and its open source license has restrictions;

4. Sencha seems to hide and obscure the access to the learning resources so that you are pushed towards their paid support.

5. It's slow;

6. The error messages (when they show up!) are cryptic.

7. ExtJS was re-designed for version 4, but some things like the Model objects are cumbersome and suffer many usage limitations;

8. It will never be adopted as a general purpose solution on Internet facing webapps for the reasons exposed above;