[TYPO3-v4] Minutes of the 4th meeting of the 4.7 Release Team

[Steffen Ritter]

Am 13.12.2011 12:41, schrieb François Suter:
>
> It seems like the move to ExtJS 4 means heavy modifications to all
> JavaScript.

To all, Modifications and workarounds we created for ExtJS3 yes.
> Could we have an idea of what's involved?

The ExtCore - basis of ExtJS has completely been rewritten... Many of 
the old things which would used standard components and were coded 
clean, work with ExtJS 4, too, but for sure can be improved performance 
wise.

The Grid and Trees which always had been a performance killer, had been 
written from scratch and are not backwards compatible anymore.

As TYPO3 extended the Grids heavily und customized it (due to 
performance reasons and lack of flexibility) these customisations need 
to be ported, which manual work of course.

The Migration until now reduced the amount  of ExtJS Code at many places 
already, as we do not need that much customisations anymore.

> I express the
> worry both as a Core Team member (what parts of the core might break)

All using ExtJS 4 :)

> and extension developers (how much might my extensions be affected?

There is a ExtJS 4 compatibility layer, which can execute ExtJS 3 Code 
in a sandbox (which really is not fun to use - handling as well speed 
wise).
Furthermore as we use Iframes custom modules can load ExtJS 3 within 
their own frame. For development in BLE we did it the another way 
around: ExtJS3 Backend, ExtJS4 Module.

To not "dirten up" the Migration and getting to know all pitfalls, 
currently there is no possibility working with ExtJS 3 anymore in backend.

For Beta1 we'll extend the pagerenderer, so that ExtJS 3 may be 
requested especially and/or the compat layer might be initialized.

ExtJS3 most likely will be shipped then within an BackwardsCompat 
Extension. Kay Strobach already had some thoughts about it, as he 
heavily used ExtJS3 Backendmodules...

The biggest problem is, that most of the backend is ExtJS2 Code-Basis 
adapted to work with ExtJS 3... SO the need for Clean rewrites get bigger.

This completely has been developed in an separete branch where this 
works and is tested, an know has to go through Gerrit. As I do not want 
to mess with our merge policy completely, I at least have to wait for 
another testing review or some feedback.

Furthermore it seems reasonable to me, that years of developement and in 
some parts not as clean code as we would wish we have, cannot be 
migrated within one patchset or one day and we have to live with some 
drawbacks in the backend within an Alpha phase.

I hope i could satisfy your concerns and demand of answers. If anything 
is left unclear, feel free to ask. This for sure is interesting for 
others, too.

regards

Steffen

-- 
Steffen Ritter
Release Manager TYPO3 4.7

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