Announcing Sencha GXT 4 is Generally Available

On behalf of Sencha and the entire GXT team, I’m proud to announce that Sencha GXT 4 is generally available. GXT 4 is a huge step forward in extending your GXT applications to the mobile platform. With GXT 4, you’ll be able to build rich, data-centric HTML5 applications for both desktops and tablets using Java, and mobilize your existing GXT apps. Together, we have created the world’s most advanced Java framework for building feature-rich HTML5 applications. We want to take a moment to thank you, our community, for your constant support and feedback.

See It In Action!

Download Sencha GXT 4 – 30 day free trial
Sencha GXT 4 Examples Explorer
New GXT 4 Executive Dashboard App
Guides and Documentation
Register for our upcoming webinar on December 15th at 8:30am PST
Check out GXT training classes to learn all of the new features

What’s New

• Tablet Support with Touch Gestures: GXT 4 includes tablet support with the introduction of a touch and gesture system at the core of the framework.
• New Triton Theme: GXT 4 also introduces a new theme, Triton, that is designed to work across desktop and tablet devices.
• Executive Dashboard App: We are also including a sample Executive Dashboard app built using GXT 4, and optimized for both desktop and tablet experiences.

Deep Dive into GXT 4

Tablet Support with Touch Gestures

GXT 4 is the first version that allows the same code to power both desktop and touch-screen devices. It allows existing GXT applications to run on touch-screen devices with little or no modification. We have wired in all the code needed to support gestures such as pinch, zoom, swipe, tap, long press, etc., so you can take your existing desktop apps to the tablet platform. Support for devices with touch-screens can be broken down into two categories.

Gesture System – which combines native browser events such as touchstart, touchmove, and touchend, and synthesizes them into gestures. Upon interpreting the sequence and timing of these touch events, the system recognizes more complex gestures such as drag, swipe, longpress, pinch, rotate, and tap.

Touch Scroller (Momentum Scrolling) – for mobile (tablet) browsers, which improves the scrolling experience on touch sensitive devices. Most complex UI components in GXT such as Grid, TreeGrid, and Tree are now optimized for a better scrolling experience on touch-enabled devices.

New Triton Theme

We have included a fresh new theme, Triton, which makes our rich set of UI components look and feel the same on both desktop and touch-screen devices, without compromising the user experience while transitioning from a mouse and click interface on desktop to a touch-based interaction. Triton is inspired by the Ext JS 6 Triton theme, which is the single common theme available across all form factors (desktop, tablets, and phones), and uses modern design concepts such as ‘Flat UI’.

Executive Dashboard App

We are also excited to introduce our new Executive Dashboard sample application. This application showcases how great an application can look and feel with minor custom theming alongside the GXT componentry, which makes this framework the perfect choice for your Java-based HTML5 applications.

I mentioned above some of the most significant new features in GXT 4, but there’s even more to talk about. We will let you explore the other new features, enhancements, and improvements in our What’s New in GXT 4 guide, and the GXT 4 docs. We’re proud to release this version to the community and continue to evolve GXT as the best way to deliver robust Java-based HTML5 applications.

Supported Browsers and Platforms

Perhaps the most important thing that hasn’t changed in GXT 4 is that we continue to support IE8 as a first-class citizen. GXT 4 supports Safari 6+, Firefox, IE8+, Chrome, and Opera 12+. On the mobile platform, GXT 4 supports Safari on iOS 6+, Chrome on Android 4.1+, and Windows 8 touch-screen devices (such as Surface and touch-screen laptops) running IE10+.

A Big Thank You

We wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to our community. Your feature requests, suggestions, feedback, and bug reports have made it possible for us to deliver on the goals of this release. We’ve worked very hard to minimize the need for code changes when upgrading to GXT 4 from GXT 3. We hope you enjoy building new apps with GXT 4, and upgrading your existing GXT 3 apps, as much as we have enjoyed building this version.

Download the free 30-day trial today, and share your feedback in the forums.