Extjs Summary

Pros

• Commercial and Open Source licenses available
  
• High performance, customizable UI widgets
  
• Well designed, documented and extensible Component model.
  
• Good widgets. ExtJS is a superset of the widgets of all available JavaScript frameworks. With no obvious bugs it is great from a end user's perspective.
  
• Good API documentation. If you need to look up something you’ll probably find it.
  

Cons

• Applications do not degrade gracefully. Turn off JavaScript and you are left with a few lines on your screen.
  
• The CSS. It’s nearly thousand definitions which are giving you no idea which is used for what purpose.
  
• The HTML is huge. Many tags get so many CSS styles assigned that you don’t understand what’s going on. DIVs are nested so deeply that you’ll need a minute at least to find a certain widget in Firebug.
  
• Issues in loading the start page because of a 500 KB library
  
• Development/Customization  effort is significantly high in terms documentation effectiveness & IDE availability.
  

Cross channel Support

Extjs supports all major web browsers including IE 6+, Firefox 1.5+ (PC, MAC), Safari 3+, Opera 9+ (PC, MAC). Though there are issues when custom DIVs are added because parent child relationship does not render in the same way in all the browsers.

In case of an advent of a new browser one has to depend on the company Extjs as there is no way to customize the existing Extjs APIs.

UX Analysis

Various UX technologies available in the market today are making a full circle back to where it started from. The evolution started with client server technologies (desktop applications like swing or windows forms in Visual Basic etc.), moved on to web UI (Java Server Pages or Active Server Pages) and now all of them are coming back to more `desktop like` UX (AJAX or Silverlight or Flex etc.) in a browser. So we decided to do a study of the prominent AJAX/RIA technologies in different categories in the market using some fixed criteria. The study included GWT (Google Web Toolkit), YUI (Yahoo User Interface), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, Java FX & Extjs (may be more when I actually give the presentation). This blog post is a list of criteria that I used to analyze the current UX offers. I have already presented these results to the great delight to a couple of our customers.

The study includes some recommendations for each technology, a overview slide (including architecture, channel support and pros & cons). At the SAP Inside Track in Palo Alto  I will share the results with the community in a session. I also plan to blog on the findings once the event is done. This post is a teaser to make you want to come ;).

Following are the criteria this study was done at

•Cross client support/experience -

    •IE/Firefox/Other browser support

    •Support for other clients.

    •Client side installations

•Development tool support

    •Ramp up times

    •Skill set requirements

    •Overall maturity

•UX Controls

    •Out of box controls and palettes

    •Extensibility of UI controls

•Ease of customization

    •Integration efforts

    •Evolving UI design patterns

•Security and accessibility

    •Integration with SAML

    •Integration with open source frameworks

    •Ease of enterprise integration

•Performance and usability

    •Tools availability

    •User experience

Any kind of feedback or suggestions are welcome. See you guys at the event!!