[vosper]

> who also own Sencha who make Ext.js -- a pay-to-use JavaScript framework.

I pity anyone who's paying for Ext.js (self-described as "The Best JavaScript Framework In The World"). That is some ancient shit right there. They must have some poor sods who're really, truly, stuck if they're managing to get people to pay for it. I guess at least you get support in your quagmire. But good luck finding quality developers who want to work on an Ext.js project...

[Joeri]

I worked with extjs 2 and 3 for years and honestly productivity was as high or higher than angular or react. It was a game changer and allowed us to build things an order of magnitude faster than before. I really liked it. What it lacked was a good responsiveness story, and by the time they added that I was already gone, first to backbone and later to angular and react.

The amount of vendor lock-in of Extjs is massive though. It had its own JSX-like pseudolanguage for describing UI that was impossible to port to anything else. Moving away meant a total rewrite.

[mike22]

I’m on my first gig involving front-end now, with ExtJS 3.4. A few years before I joined (was able to observe the team from a periphery) they tried using Sencha’s 3.x-to-4.0 migration tool, which left the app in a state still needing attention to every LoC. The post-Idera layoffs aren’t making 6.x look too attractive.