Future of Sencha's Ext JS from the viewpoint of a geospatial developer

sencha_ext_geospatial_future

Why the future of Sencha's Ext JS is looking a lot less promising IMHO now than 5 years ago (from a geospatial developer perspective):

* the default look and feel of Ext JS is starting to become an issue (people seem fed up with the desktop like look and feel)
* do you still meet (geospatial) (core) developers enthusiastic about the technology?
* the migration from version 3 to 4 is a PITA and might not even happen for some libraries, which will give people the choice of moving on to a different technology (at the same or even less cost) [1]
* no single solution that works well on both mobile and desktop

[1] Please note that I currently have no clue what the new framework / technology is that people will migrate to most, or based on which frameworks new libraries will be created.

Also, as a developer, I have invested a lot of time and energy in this technology, so for me this is a bad thing in a way.

And the issue of paying for a license if doing commercial work must put some off.

Good point @coastalrocket although this has been the case almost from the start. But even in the beginning a lot of people raised concerns about this.
Also the fact that governance of the project is not open, and that it is not a truly open source project (no public issue tracker) in that sense, raises concerns with some people.
Both issues are not a personal concern of mine though, but I do hear other people complain about it.

The look and feel can of course be modified to something of you own. Although it could certainly be easier:
http://gardskart.skogoglandskap.no/map.html?komm=0625&gnr=11&bnr=1

For the rest of your comments I fully agree.

That's a cool looking theme you got there @esisa. @bartvde: I agree that there are some annoying differences between ExtJS 4 and Sencha Touch 2. I hope these product lines will be merged somehow in the future.

@bartvde. I fervently believe that Ext JS continues to rule as the absolute best choice for serious JavaScript app development - and to address your specific concerns:

1. Yes our classic theme was looking outdated. But I hope you like the look of our new Neptune theme which shipped today for Ext JS 4.2. (http://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-march-madness). It's contemporary (flatter, more angular and more spacey), but continues to have all the detailed behavior that I think has always made Ext JS the best choice for complex apps - proper behavior under nesting/no-nesting, a rich layout system etc.

2. Yes the migration from 3 to 4 is not straightforward (even with the compatibility layer and migration guide). In retrospect, we were a little too ambitious with 4.0 and changed too many things at one time. We've definitely learned from that.

3. Mobile/Desktop We took the stance early that you needed to develop a different style of app for phone/table vs. desktop. We intend to make Ext JS more tablet friendly in the future, but it will still be a better user experience to design something from the ground up for a touch interface.

We take our open source licensing seriously and everything we do in the frameworks side is open source under GPLv3 as well as commercial. We have a great roadmap ahead for both Ext JS and Touch, and I hope you'll think about coming to SenchaCon this July in Orlando to see the community in action.

All the best,

@mmullany (Sencha CEO)