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Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

So did you do JS development back in 2006 without jQuery?

I started with Prototype. Not sure if it came out before or after the first jQuery, but it was the cool kid for a while. Then the world realized it was a disaster and started moving to jQuery...

Too bad Magento devs missed that newsflash. Nowadays it still bundles Prototype.js, and every theme and 50% third-party modules you install carry their own copies of jQuery, all at different versions, placed in random locations, and embedded into the page differently.

I know a bunch of devs who always preferred Mootools and never did jQuery.

I did, then Safari 1.0 happened, and we all went screaming for a solution. Praise jQuery.

The first few years I did PHP without much client side scripting.

Then ExtJS, then a short stint with Ember and after that React.

Ah, ok, so you're not a 10 year JavaScript developer, that's very different thing. If you were doing DOM manip 10 years ago without jQuery / MooTools / Dojo / YUI you would be someone that loves pain.

Yes.

I started with learning vanilla JS and doing my professional stuff with ExtJS.

But as you say, jQuery wasn't a requirement. I knew a few people who hated it with passion back then, they were all using MooTools. That's probably why I avoided it...

What was your experience with Ext? I had to use it for a few years, and was never a huge fan. We ran into a lot of obscure bugs in their code which resulted in a number of hackaround "Ext.Overrides," and their support forums (Mitch Simmeons in particular) is a joke.

Which version did you use?

I only used ExtJS 4 and 4.1

I liked their API documentation and the xtypes that allowed for declarative Views. React reminded me of this later.

I started on 3(.5?) and helped with a migration to 4 (which was a disgusting mistake of a process on our end). I like the format of their docs -- JSDuck was my favorite docset for a quite a while. I also enjoyed their methodology for constructing views and view hierarchies. Ultimately, I'd say I was a fan of what they were doing, I just think the implementation was rather shoddy, and the docs were frequently wrong or outdated, and (as mentioned) support was not good. When I got to React, it actually did bring back some memories of Ext, but without the full MVC hierarchy around views.

Ah yes.

I read about those problems.

First they changed the license then the switch from 3 to 4.

This cost them many customers.

I started with 4, so I didn'T encounter these problems.

Yes

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