Ext Core 3.0 Beta released under MIT license | Hacker News Reader

Ext Core 3.0 Beta released under MIT license

extjs.com

5 pointsDocSavage6 comments

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-... ); 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...

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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