Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: ]project-open[: Current thinking about AJAX, Sencha and AOLserver

Hi Frank,

This is very interesting.

I have used ExtJs (the predecessor to Sencha) and it was definitely very challanging to develop an debug but very interesting. With the new mobile features it is very compelling.

Do you have any information on accessible use of Sencha? I found with the way ExtJs took over the entire DOM and created the entire UI in javascript to be slow, and hard to manage. It definitely could have changed since I last looked. It seems that progressive enhacncement is easy to develop accessible web applications, and also makes they very usable on mobile devices without any extra special code.

I appreciate any insight you can give.

ExtJS can be pretty fast, but you need to manage your code better than progressive enhancement for sure. For example, minify+gzip all the code, long expiring headers, etc.

If you have an app that doesn't need to look like a desktop app (like windows xp's file browser or MS Office apps), you need to support users without javascript running (still like 2% in the US!), etc. then jquery is a better way to go.

They are not incompatible though - I use jquery for many things - even on the same page as extjs code (jquery is absolutely tiny and doesn't add any overhead).