Anyone tried Sencha?

9 views
Skip to first unread message

mike tissenbaum

unread,
Mar 7, 2012, 12:53:38 PM3/7/12
to educ...@googlegroups.com
THey have the new version of their framework out and I was wondering what people thought of it versus say Jquery mobile

Matt Zukowski

unread,
Mar 7, 2012, 1:45:20 PM3/7/12
to educ...@googlegroups.com
A while back I saw a really good chart comparing all of these mobile js frameworks... can't seem to find it anymore :(

Anyway one of the things that chart showed was how some libraries get you to build the UI in HTML+CSS3 markup (and you then bind behaviour to that markup using JavaScript), and how in others you build the UI programmatically, in pure JavaScript without really writing any HTML.

Sencha is in the latter group. All-JavaScript, no HTML. I'm not crazy about this... I think UIs should be built in languages that are good at laying out UIs (i.e. markup languages like HTML), and behaviour should be programmed in languages that are good at behaviour (JavaScript). This is probably a matter of opinion/preference, and I kind of get why sometimes you want to do views programmatically, but I'm not crazy about Sencha's approach. I think there's too much naive, walled-garden abstraction going on there.

jQuery Mobile goes the other way--UI is written in HTML, behaviour in JavaScript--and for that I like it better. 

That said, we're still not using any of these frameworks in our Sail.js stuff, mostly because they're very opinionated about how a "mobile web app" should look and feel. This doesn't  work well with the sort of stuff we've been doing at the lab, where simple form-and-button based inputs are the exception rather than the norm.

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:53 PM, mike tissenbaum <miketis...@gmail.com> wrote:
THey have the new version of their framework out and I was wondering what people thought of it versus say Jquery mobile

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Educoder" group.
To post to this group, send email to educ...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to educoder+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/educoder?hl=en.

Armin Krauss

unread,
Mar 7, 2012, 2:20:51 PM3/7/12
to educ...@googlegroups.com
Hey,

I agree with Matt and I am happy he described it much better than I would have done.
Last time I looked at Sencha I also didn't like their CSS approach. If I am not totally wrong
they use their own thing that then gets transformed into CSS. This is like using CoffeeScript
or Dart to create JavaScript. While adding extra functionality and comfort pure CSS and
JavaScript are skills that more people possess than some kind of hexmex to create those.

Also I am not a fan of frameworks forcing you to do certain things a certain way. We use
jQuery since it give you great DOM selectors and helps with Ajax calls, but even their UI
stuff is not too great. jQuery UI feels wrong to me, too flashy and too restricted.

What I would like to use is a CSS framework that helps to simplify the creating of a good looking
and adaptive layout. Something 960.

As for JS, we will probably keep using jQuery and add Backbone.js or something similar to
get MVC.

Keep it real ;)

Armin
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages