

Ext Core 3.0 Beta released under MIT license - DocSavage
http://extjs.com/blog/2009/04/04/ext-core-30-beta-released/

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justinsb
These guys seriously need to stop messing with their licenses!

Their ExtJS library switched to GPL in their 2.0 -> 2.1 upgrade (
[http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/04/24/ext-discovers-
step-...](http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/04/24/ext-discovers-step-2-of-
the-slashdot-business-model/) ); for me this meant we had to remove ExtJS from
our product.

There were 2 concerns: obviously the fact that it was GPL and we'd then be
locked in to paying licensing costs or be forced to open source everything;
but more importantly that this meant that the switch would hurt the project
going forwards, and we'd be investing in a dying framework.

After the way they handled their switch to GPL, this feels like an attempt at
confusing people into thinking that ExtJS is MIT licensed, rather than trying
to be a better community player. Unless they're going to commit to putting
ExtJS under the MIT license of course...

And don't even get me started on the background to their 'Ext GWT' product...

~~~
DocSavage
I'd rather they get it right. This 3.0 release is a clean start hopefully. The
Core will be MIT license, so there's no confusion over what you can do and
what you can't do with it. I've got no problem with them building great
commercial frameworks on the open source core, especially if it means some of
that commercial stuff might eventually migrate down the chain to the open
source version. Of course, people were burned on the previous license switch
so they lost some developers there.

Aside from the licensing issues, I think the ExtJS developers (Jack Slocum et
al) are great javascript hackers. ExtJS is a great javascript framework,
particularly the data grid component.

There's also the upcoming Ext 3.0 Designer, which reminds me of the 280North
Atlas GUI designer. <http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52258>

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jpedrosa
For the most part, several Javascript libraries have solved the basics of
cross-platform browser support quite well and entire ecosystems were built
using them.

I regard Ext Core to being quite similar to other libraries even though it
could pack more quality features into just a relatively small file. That is,
If I were looking for something "current" I would look into Ext Core as well.
But I have high hopes for YUI 3 which will have dynamic loading of features
and contextual programming with both CSS and Javascript to let folks create
relatively safe and packaged Javascript programs that could then be embedded
in other sites without disrupting their looks or functions.

Perhaps YUI 3 is a little bit on the "over-engineering" side, but so long as
it works as a stable foundation down the road it could well be the future.

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BjornW
I have tried the previous versions and I was a bit confused about it. It seems
the extjs does not really care about no-javascript, because switching off
javascript led to all sorts of issues. Its not so much that we expected people
to have javascript turned off, but people are using mobile browser with
limited capabilities and with using extjs the experience would degrade too
much. At that time I was not impressed since I was looking for a non-obtrusive
way of implementing javascript based interaction enhancements into our project
and I expected (perhaps wrongly) the extjs framework to take this into
consideration. Anyone have any experience with the new version and how it
behaves now when javascript is either turned of or has limited capabilities?

~~~
mcav
ExtJS, being one of the most UI-focused libraries, seems to regard javascript-
less browsers as a non-target. I don't blame them -- Ext focuses on window
design and emulating desktop functionality rather than use as a page
enhancement.

Though I stopped looking at them with all of the licensing crap issues from
earlier. Not sure what this new license will entail for them.

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jpcx01
I like the new core api a lot. Ext.select acts similar to jquery's $() and
Ext.request acts similar to jQuery.ajax. Good to see more standardization in
the js framework library design.

