5 ms·

I feel like these numbers may be skewed due to Ext's miserable documentation and inconsistent behavior. There simply isn't much good ext related info out there

I feel like these numbers may be skewed due to Ext's miserable documentation and inconsistent behavior. There simply isn't much good ext related info out there once you want to do anything complex (and thus one using Ext spends more time entering queries). I feel like >50% of my Ext related searches end up fruitless and I'm stuck banging on it till I can determine how it actually works (vs. how the docs might make you think it works). Or maybe I'm dense.

aespinoza 14y ago
ExtJs' documentation is amazing. I agree that the chart doesn't make that much sense compared to AngularJS or Backbone, but it is not about documentation. Just look at here: http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.0/ http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.0/ And they also have samples: http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/ http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/
- just2n 14y ago
  Having lots of stuff in a doc page doesn't mean your docs are any good. I spent 2 years writing against the latest stable ExtJS. At about 3 months, I stopped using their docs for anything but cursory information: what methods does this class have of its own, what does it inherit, what is its class hierarchy, etc. That information is dynamically generated and typically spot on. The rest is generated by doc comments, and it's very hit or miss. Instead, if I needed to know ANY details of a function, I clicked on the '.js' link on the right side of the page in the class hierarchy to load the .js file in the browser, then a quick cmd+f would show me what I needed to know, because I can parse consistently formatted JS faster than I can grok their vertically challenged documentation. JSDuck pulls inherited docs if function-level docs are omitted in a subclass, too, and sometimes they're just plain wrong because of that. After about 6 months, I had committed to memory about 60% of Ext (all but the graphing bits, mainly, which I never used). I believe a good library is one that you don't need to worry about, ever. So naturally, being required to delve into Ext's source so often to me is unacceptable of something that is a paid product. I would've been fine to fix so much in Ext, but it isn't developed in public via something like github, even though it's dual licensed, which meant the only way to do that was to post on their forums. No thanks. 4.x came a long way in rendering performance, but there were still critical paths that were untouched, including layout logic that determined when to perform layouts. They aren't required almost ever, but are used liberally, so while making the process faster is a benefit, the fundamental problem remains. A 200ms (for us, YMMV) layout problem was fixed (down to < 1ms) by a +5-0 change that added heuristics to determine when a layout was actually needed. This is a trivial change, and could be thrown in a PR at no cost. I'm not going to copy my code on the forums and hope someone at Sencha will manually merge that into whatever bleeding-edge version they have.
joekrill 14y ago
Wow you think so? I think Ext is one of the more well documented libraries out there. When that fails, I can jump into the code directly and get even more info. And the code itself is very well documented.
- canthonytucci 14y ago
  I do. My experience has been that they are cryptic or just plain wrong on more than on occasion. I've seen a lot of places where there are comments correcting them or just pointing out that what they say is not what actually happens. Note, this is all anecdotal- My adventures with direct proxies and nested layouts had me doing a lot of trial and error coding, this may not be a representative experience.
smrtinsert 14y ago
It's not just you. Ext has grown into a gui toolkit unlike something like Smartclient which was born from gui toolkit experience. The Smartclient api makes WAY more sense in everyway and every method is where you expect it to be, unlike Ext which makes bizarre infruriating choices and results in you buying a cookbook in order to be anywhere near productive with it. I bet you we could fund a kickstarter with angry ex-Ext users.
- canthonytucci 14y ago
  At least form a support group? It's nice to hear that someone else finds Ext's choices hard to understand at times, I'm the only guy around here who needs to work with it so it can be hard to know when it is me and when it is something fishy. Don't get me started about the almost completely undocumented "Sencha Architect" which overwrites any changes you make to code in another editor when you re open a project....

aespinoza 14y ago

ExtJs' documentation is amazing. I agree that the chart doesn't make that much sense compared to AngularJS or Backbone, but it is not about documentation. Just look at here: http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.0/ http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.0/ And they also have samples: http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/ http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/

just2n 14y ago
Having lots of stuff in a doc page doesn't mean your docs are any good. I spent 2 years writing against the latest stable ExtJS. At about 3 months, I stopped using their docs for anything but cursory information: what methods does this class have of its own, what does it inherit, what is its class hierarchy, etc. That information is dynamically generated and typically spot on. The rest is generated by doc comments, and it's very hit or miss. Instead, if I needed to know ANY details of a function, I clicked on the '.js' link on the right side of the page in the class hierarchy to load the .js file in the browser, then a quick cmd+f would show me what I needed to know, because I can parse consistently formatted JS faster than I can grok their vertically challenged documentation. JSDuck pulls inherited docs if function-level docs are omitted in a subclass, too, and sometimes they're just plain wrong because of that. After about 6 months, I had committed to memory about 60% of Ext (all but the graphing bits, mainly, which I never used). I believe a good library is one that you don't need to worry about, ever. So naturally, being required to delve into Ext's source so often to me is unacceptable of something that is a paid product. I would've been fine to fix so much in Ext, but it isn't developed in public via something like github, even though it's dual licensed, which meant the only way to do that was to post on their forums. No thanks. 4.x came a long way in rendering performance, but there were still critical paths that were untouched, including layout logic that determined when to perform layouts. They aren't required almost ever, but are used liberally, so while making the process faster is a benefit, the fundamental problem remains. A 200ms (for us, YMMV) layout problem was fixed (down to < 1ms) by a +5-0 change that added heuristics to determine when a layout was actually needed. This is a trivial change, and could be thrown in a PR at no cost. I'm not going to copy my code on the forums and hope someone at Sencha will manually merge that into whatever bleeding-edge version they have.

joekrill 14y ago

Wow you think so? I think Ext is one of the more well documented libraries out there. When that fails, I can jump into the code directly and get even more info. And the code itself is very well documented.

canthonytucci 14y ago
I do. My experience has been that they are cryptic or just plain wrong on more than on occasion. I've seen a lot of places where there are comments correcting them or just pointing out that what they say is not what actually happens. Note, this is all anecdotal- My adventures with direct proxies and nested layouts had me doing a lot of trial and error coding, this may not be a representative experience.

smrtinsert 14y ago

It's not just you. Ext has grown into a gui toolkit unlike something like Smartclient which was born from gui toolkit experience. The Smartclient api makes WAY more sense in everyway and every method is where you expect it to be, unlike Ext which makes bizarre infruriating choices and results in you buying a cookbook in order to be anywhere near productive with it. I bet you we could fund a kickstarter with angry ex-Ext users.

canthonytucci 14y ago
At least form a support group? It's nice to hear that someone else finds Ext's choices hard to understand at times, I'm the only guy around here who needs to work with it so it can be hard to know when it is me and when it is something fishy. Don't get me started about the almost completely undocumented "Sencha Architect" which overwrites any changes you make to code in another editor when you re open a project....