The year has started off with a bang for us here at Sencha, and we’ve been working hard across all of our products. In the last three months, we’ve shipped Ext Designer 1.1, Sencha Touch 1.1 and a beta release of Ext JS 4. Now, we’d like to share with the community what we think the rest of the year looks like and what to expect from our frameworks and tools. I should add the standard disclaimer that this is our best estimate of what will happen when, but we have no doubt that these will continue to evolve.
Table of Contents
Ext JS
As we mentioned in the Ext JS Beta 1 announcement, we’re on track to deliver the final version of Ext JS 4.0 by the end of April. We started releasing Ext JS 4 as a developer preview in mid-February and we’ve had a huge amount of feedback from the community. With the community’s help we’ve fixed over 600 issues since PR1! We’re excited to keep working on making Ext JS 4 the best Ext JS release yet. After 4.0, we tentatively expect a minor release sometime in the summer.
Ext GWT
During SenchaCon 2010 we said that we would release Ext GWT 3.0 in Q2 of 2011 and we remain on track for this. Much like we did with Ext JS, we’re preparing a series of Ext GWT preview releases and betas this spring, with final product delivery this summer. One of the primary goals of Ext GWT 3 is to bring the library more in line with the current GWT design and features. This includes changes to support GWT Handlers, UIBinder, MVP, Editors, SafeHtml, RequestBuilder, AutoBean and others. We have also refactored our stores and loaders which now work with both AutoBeans and any standard Java bean. It will also be easier to use Ext GWT Components with GWT Layout Widgets, and to use GWT Widgets with Ext GWT Containers.
Ext Designer
The 1.1 release of Ext Designer added many new features that helped make a component and UI designer’s life easier and better integrated into the developer workflow. We’re planning one additional release in the Designer 1.x family to support Ext JS 4 and hope to make it available by summer. Looking ahead to Designer 2, as we talked about at SenchaCon 2010, our plan is to take a major leap forward in Designer functionality and make Designer a more general purpose application builder for both Ext JS and Sencha Touch developers. You’ll see improvements like integration of the MVC, better data integration and other fun surprises we’ll share soon. Expect to see Designer 2 in preview this fall.
Sencha Touch
In early March we released Sencha Touch 1.1 with support for features like pull to refresh and BlackBerry OS6. We’re in full gear on Sencha Touch 2.0 and aim to be in preview this summer with it. Sencha Touch 2.0 will be an evolutionary step in our Touch product, and we’re looking to bring greater consistency in the core platform between Ext JS and Touch. In the spring, we’ll also release a touch compatible version of our charting package so developers can make beautiful, mobile-friendly, plugin-free charts.
Sencha Animator
Currently in Developer Preview, we’re super excited about the progress we’re making internally on Animator. Targeting a mid to late summer v1, we’ve made great progress on preparing to move from the developer preview state to our first beta and we anticipate delivering the first beta in 4-6 weeks. You can look forward to many new features in each Animator release heading to v1 that make it feel more comfortable to a user of animation tools. We’ll be adding in things like better easing visualization, new keyboard shortcuts, and many other “pro” features. Our community has been fantastic in providing us feedback on how to make Animator a first rate tool for interactive and animated content in HTML5.
And More…
This is just an update on the public commitments we’ve made for our roadmap, we’ve also got a few new things under wraps that we’ll be launching this summer. We hope to update you on those just as soon as they’re ready for unveiling. Thanks for being part of the Sencha community, and keep the feedback coming!
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Can’t wait for all the things this year!
You guys are rocking.
Keep it up
Does ExtJS include supported markup for WAI-ARIA?
The entire suite of products is really coming together nicely. Keep up the effort.
The most exciting sentence for me:
“Sencha Touch 2.0 will be an evolutionary step in Touch product, and we’re looking to bring greater consistency in the core platform between Ext JS and Touch.”
:-D
Better make it quick, you know we will start from year 0 starting next year.
>> In the spring, we’ll also release a touch compatible version of our charting package so developers can make beautiful, mobile-friendly, plugin-free charts.
Ed, will the drawing package be available along with charting? And just to make sure this will be available in Spring this year, correct?
@Stacey — we plan to support AIRA in dot release after 4.0.
Can ExtJS Add MultiColumn ComboBox widget in version 4 ?
@Les the charts are built on top of Ext.draw, so yes :)
Can you please not use “summer” as a time. When is your summer? In South Africa it starts in December! So for your clients in South Africa Ext Designer for ExtJS 4.0 will only be released in December! Is that correct?
@John — by summer we mean North American summer, sorry for the confusion.
OH, “North American Summer” so the people in Europe and Asia have different summers? Very interesting!
When is North American Summer? (ha ha)
Maybe we should use North of the Equator Summer and South of the Equator Summer.
Lets hope nobody on the International Space Station is interested. When is summer in orbit?
Eric
Any plan for Sencha Touch to support for WebOS ?
@Xavier — we’re always evaluating new platforms for Sencha Touch, including Web OS. We don’t have any committed plans at the moment, but we’re keeping a keen eye on it.
As always, you rock! All the announcements at SenchaCon 2010 was exciting and hopeful. It’s so cool to see many of them come to fruition.
Is it Possible to have Sencha touch as a gwt java api instead of javascript please ? like for ext-js :)
I ve heard something about EXT-GWT Touch. dont know if that s in work. If not you still can build a JSNI around sencha touch if you like :)
I though about that but i m too busy with other projects at the moment.I ll have a look at that
Are you planning to put Ext.Direct into Sencha Platform? I did a quick hack with the Direct code from Ext JS 3.3.1 to make it compatable with Touch 1.1 and it seemed to work well.
OH, “North American Summer” so the people in Europe and Asia have different summers? Very interesting!
When is North American Summer? (ha ha)
Maybe we should use North of the Equator Summer and South of the Equator Summer.
Lets hope nobody on the International Space Station is interested. When is summer in orbit?
Eric
As always, you rock! All the announcements at SenchaCon 2010 was exciting and hopeful. It’s so cool to see many of them come to fruition.
I already migrated EXT JS 4 charting component to Touch, check it out in http://code.google.com/p/oppo-touching/. It works well in my iPod Touch and iPad.
It is wonderful if Sencha Touch include the charting by default. Please make sure also supporting canvas based charting.
Can’t the Ext Designer itself be made into a web component and part of ExtJS suite that can be used/extended by end users with their own back-end/logic bindings to have “form designer” capabilities in applications ?
wow sencha touch 2.0 , yummy :)
Are there any plans to provide gesture support to Ext JS? I understand that phones need special/unique UI support due to size limitations but the tablet market can support RIAs using EXT JS in lieu of Sencha Touch. We have a complex app thet renders fine on an iPad and would work great if there was gesture support.
At a high level, this update is great – thanks for the info! One thing I liked about previous roadmaps (and this was especially true of Ext JS) was a list of the things being worked on for Q3, Q4, etc., up to a year out, so we had an idea of what new functionality to expect. Can we have something like that also?
@Steve Lisbin — interesting idea, we’ll definitely look at it.
Thanks for all your excellent work Sencha devs! I’m looking forward to the exciting times ahead with all the releases lined up.
Please consider not referring to time by season. Some of us live in locations outside the US (yes surprise other places really do exist). It actually reads as quite offensive to someone who is not American.
Isaac, look here … “Mac OS X Lion, available in summer 2011”
http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/
I check many Apple blogs and did not hear anyone being offended by Apple referring to the Mac OS X release by season.
Les, so your argument is: look a large US corporation does it too so it must be fine.
It is mildly offensive because it promotes that America is the only place of importance on earth. It is language that treats non-Americans as second class citizens of the world.
Anyway Sencha do a lot of outstanding work that I really appreciate. I am sure offense was not intended. I don’t hold anything against them for sure. It’s just advice that they can take or leave.
Isaac,
I think you should inspect your own language first before making these wild accusations. Apple is the World’s most admired company (for the fourth year) and Sencha is a software leader in its own space.
Les, I’m not here to debate some point with you. Your not from Sencha so let it go. Someone from Sencha can ignore it or take it on board in future communications as they see fit. I already said twice Sencha do outstanding work that I do appreciate so I don’t know why your pointing that out to me.
As for Apple they make good products except for the walled garden approach, but I don’t think they have to concern themselves with being overly polite. Its a massive company and people will buy it anyway.
I can not wait for Ext JS 4.0!!
It sounds like if I want to build a web front end for both desktop/laptops as well as mobile, I’ll need to develop with Ext JS and Sencha Touch separately. What are the plans to merge functionality? It looks like some people have already started to hack together hybrids. How would you recommend building a web-client that ran on desktop/laptop, tablet, and smart phone with Sencha’s tools?
@John K
Hava a look at http://code.google.com/p/gwt4air/
Cant wait for the native code addon ;-)
We have to make new desktop like web application and we are on step of choosing the most appropriate framework for it. We have stopped on GWT, Smart GWT and GXT atm. We don’t want to make it using GXT 2.x because of incompatibility to base GWT. As GXT 3.0 promises to get back to GWT event handlers, we would like to give it a try. As it was promised in the article first betas should appear this spring. Spring will be over soon and there is still no info about GXT v3. I’d appreciate any news about GXT 3.
ty
@raivis
We plan to have the first preview release of 3.0 the first week of June and to go final this summer.
@Darrel Meyer
Thank you
Will ExtGWT 3.0 support plugin-free charts, like ExtJS 4.0 does?
@Darrell Meyer
Yee haaw – the first week of june has arrived! Waiting for Ext GWT 3 preview release…
Well, the first week of June is over and there are no betas of GXT v3. I feel a bit disappointed as I’ve been waiting for this version since January.
The EXT-GWT team has been desapointing for some long time now imho.
It’ sad :(
About the GXT v3 preview, we’re running a bit behind. Expect something this week.
Looking forward.
Still looking forward….
@Darrell Meyer
Dear, now that GXT 3.0 DP 2 are avaliable coming some dubts. They´re supporting for GWT Platform approaches? Where we´ll can find roadmap? And, finally, new features from GWT 2.2 and 2.3 are supported?
Thanks for your attetion.
Any news on when Senca Touch 2.0 will be released?