[FLOW3-general] Rumours of Phoenix dropping ExtJS?

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 9-10-2011 16:03, "Christian Müller (Kitsunet)" wrote:
> On 08/10/11 10:34, Olivier Dobberkau wrote:
>> Am 07.10.11 23:43, schrieb Jigal van Hemert:
>>
>>> I really wonder what happened with the enthusiasm of the Senscha people
>>> that it wasn't possible to achieve the goals with ExtJS.
>> maybe robert and karsten can respond this. as far as i know there was no
>> call for help to sencha.
>>
> About Sencha, I know nothing about a call for help to them. Actually in
> the beginning of the year as we waited for ExtJS 4 we asked them for a
> preview version just to check how much of our code we would need to
> adjust but we couldn't get one and so it stalled and stalled for quite
> some time.

Just before the RC release of TYPO3 4.6 I have not much time left to 
view videos; that will come later.

NOTE: if things below sound like harsh criticism, please beware that it 
isn't meant like that. It may partly be because English is not my first 
language and partly because I'm passionate about TYPO3; I want the 
future to be bright, I want current users of TYPO3 to keep using it for 
ages and developers to find it worthwhile to continue developing for 
TYPO3. Please keep this intention in mind when reading the rest.

A few things to consider:

- during T3CON09 there were presentations about the new TYPO3v5 and also 
some sessions with ExtJS (now Sencha) developers. Everybody was 
enthusiastic about using ExtJS for the v5 UI and it was agreed that the 
ideas in the mock-ups could be realized with ExtJS. It seems like a good 
contact between ExtJS and TYPO3

- extension developers have to learn techniques or get used to 
frameworks. People invest time in Extbase/Fluid based on the promise 
that this is the future of extension development and that their code can 
easily be ported to FLOW3 packages. Large parts of the TYPO3v4 BE and 
system modules are converted to ExtJS and together with the previous 
point developers would expect that investing time in ExtJS will help 
them for TYPO3v5 too.

- loading yet another framework (200KB) does matter. Even if it is 
locally cached it must still be loaded and processed in the browser with 
every page. It takes time, processing power and memory, and will thus 
slow things down. It increases the chances for conflicts and other errors

- using multiple frameworks requires knowledge of all these frameworks 
for maintenance, new features and bug fixing

- TYPO3v5 would be a nice demo platform for Sencha; good contacts 
between both teams would be mutually beneficial. If paid support helps 
the relationship it would be worthwhile to try and find 
budget/sponsoring and maybe get cooperation from Sencha to get premium 
support for the basic price.

- even though the code base is different (we do have Extbase as a 
backport of FLOW3 in the v4 core...) and the UI concepts are a visionary 
revolution, Phoenix will still be the next (super)major version of the 
CSM known as TYPO3. This also means that we want current users of TYPO3 
to use v5 in the future. Starting with the Transition Days a path has 
started to make a (slow) transition towards v5. There is thus a 
responsibility for the v5 team to make this transition path possible. If 
v5 is an ever moving target it is hard for the v4 team to make a 
reliable path possible.

Back to fixing some bugs...

-- 
Kind regards / met vriendelijke groet,

Jigal van Hemert.