[TYPO3-v4] The future of ExtJS 4 in TYPO3 4.7

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 11-1-2012 16:47, Oliver Hader wrote:

It's very sad to say, but the current state of the core 4.7-dev with 
regard to the use of ExtJS is simply not at a level where we can expect 
that it will be good enough for a beta in a few weeks. This is probably 
mainly due to the lack of ExtJS experts.

The choices you proposed (which are completely logical!) are like 
choosing between two evils: either losing functionality all over the 
place or losing new developments.

In this light the suggestion of Olivier seems like a good third option 
to investigate. If Sencha is willing to provide help with migrating the 
"rest" of the core to ExtJS4 this would mean that we can easily keep the 
new developments. The enthusiasm of the ExtJS guys a few T3CONs ago 
almost suggested that they liked it very much that TYPO3 used their JS 
framework.

While it is understandable that it must not be nice for the developers 
of the new components to learn that they will not be included in this 
form in this release, it's also understandable that we can't release a 
new version where a lot of existing features don't function any more.

One more that worries me about ExtJS4 is this quote from [1]:
"While 4.1 is clearly a big improvement over 4.0, it is not yet as fast 
across the board as 3.4"
We've been trying hard to improve the speed of the TYPO3 backend because 
it feels slow to people. Using ExtJS4 will not improve the (perceived) 
speed, I'm afraid.

For the future of JS in the TYPO3 core it seems that we need some hybrid 
solution.
AFAIK ExtJS can run on top of for example jQuery. This would only safe 
loading Ext.base, but it would also mean that jQuery is available by 
default (as desired by many I guess). To keep the BE a bit "light" on 
loading JS frameworks we should definitely get rid of the last bits of 
prototype / scriptaculous / mootools / YUI / etc.

 From posts by Olly I conclude that only "vidi" depends on ExtJS4. If 
the release managers team after thoroughly testing think it's ready to 
go in the core, except for the modifications to run with ExtJS3 we could 
give it until beta2 to see if it can be shipped with 4.7.
I don't like exceptions for the feature freeze, but in the light of this 
change back to ExtJS3 it seems reasonable.

[1] http://www.sencha.com/blog/whats-new-in-ext-js-4-1/

-- 
Kind regards / met vriendelijke groet,

Jigal van Hemert.