We are delighted to add Sencha to the IDERA family. In the last few weeks, we’ve spent a lot of time learning about the business and products and speaking with developers, customers, and global resellers. I am really excited about the opportunity to build on the success of the Ext JS family of products.
Amongst my many observations, two stand out from conversations so far. One is the passionate community of developers and customers devoted to the products. Second is the amazing applications built via Ext JS that are used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I’ve worked with many toolchains and developer solutions, but Ext JS’s scalability is second to none. I am encouraged by the opportunity to invest in further differentiating Sencha’s products.
At IDERA, exceptional products drive our success. This is the most important thing that our CEO, Randy Jacops, emphasizes. We have a simple philosophy that prioritizes ease of use, quality, and scalability. We believe this approach will benefit all Sencha customers and conversations thus far confirm this.
Sencha is an almost perfect extension of Embarcadero’s solution. Adding Sencha makes our Development Tools business much stronger. We are able to extend language coverage to the JS community, which is not only large, but also growing fast. Ext JS is an excellent Web Framework that our Embarcadero developer community (who are currently focused primarily on Delphi and C++) can adopt. We advocate open architectures and will continue providing developers with the flexibility to decide how best to build applications.
Ext JS will continue as a distinct product line, but supported by greater resources. We believe there is an opportunity to reignite the Ext JS community and get more new developers to appreciate its power and productivity. We know our Enterprise customers like to choose from a variety of tools that support various business priorities and standards. We expect to accelerate Sencha’s efforts to ensure a cohesive and integrated technology path to both support and advance developer productivity.
2017 has been great for advancing Sencha products. Ext JS 6.5 was a solid release that continues to modernize the platform while improving quality. I understand that past product releases may have included platform changes that complicated migrations. The path forward will build on the success of 6.5 and our goal will be to simplify future migrations. Version 7 and beyond will modernize in parallel with JS advances, but compatibility and ease of migration will be central to our release strategy. We understand this is important for customers and will prioritize accordingly. We also appreciate Sencha’s progress with Ext React and Sencha Test. We hope these products open our technology to new JS markets and deliver much needed testing functionality to existing customers. Your feedback regarding priorities and progress will be critical to my investment decisions. As a result, please expect to continue dialoguing as we all move to an even more aligned future.
There is a lot to learn and a lot to do, but we are confident both Sencha’s products and customers will thrive with IDERA. As we progress, I will provide periodic updates to emphasize our commitment to the above concepts. I know how busy developers are, but we truly value your opinions, so do not hesitate to contact us and tell us how we can do better. It is a great time to be an Ext JS developer. Thank you for being part of our community!
Contact Sencha
Please share your product feedback with us on the Sencha forum, or you can contact Atanas directly at atanas.popov@embarcadero.com.
Ext JS is a great product which has been steadily improving, but the 5-developer purchase requirement is killing its popularity. This needs to change, pronto.
There are hardly any new Ext JS projects in the Chicago area where I live. I have been working as a contractor on maintenance projects for the past two years, and I’m afraid even these opportunities will soon disappear if the pricing structure is not changed.
Ext JS is not that complex that it would require a team of five developers!
Thank you for all you have done for me
Now is the moment to drop that insane 5 devs license requirement. As Ext was acquired by a new company, you have the perfect justification.
if that doesn’t change, not now not ever will be a good moment to become a ExtJS
Please, please keep Sencha Architect alive – it is the best thing about ExtJS other than ExtJS itself – no other framework has anything like it
Sencha Architect is good, but it’s not the best thing about ExtJs. We worked exclusively with Sencha Architect for three years. Ditching it in favor of VSCode and the ExtJs plugin has improved our productivity more than anything. You should try it!
I still do some wireframe/prototyping in Architect , but I usually find myself moving the generated code to VSCode within an hour.
Since Idera also owns Delphi, which has some similarities to Architect, maybe there will some added emphasis. Long shot, I know, but possible.
Good work Atanas and a wish for many successes.
However, I fear that successes will not be achieved unless the five devs license requirement, which has already done so much damage to the Sencha product ecosystem, is immediately abolished.
Not only the rule of five devs license requirement is a commercial suicide, but it is also a morally unjust rule.
I hope that you will be able to do so as soon as possible if you want to have any chance of making the product (which is very remarkable) popular again.
“We believe there is an opportunity to reignite the Ext JS community and get more new developers to appreciate its power and productivity.”
Do you have any real plan how you will do that or just some abstract dream?
I would fix the heading to:
“It’s great time to REMAIN the developer of Ext JS”
I bought Extjs from version 3 to 5, when I was thrown overboard, along with many other loyalists …
Talk to folks who presented at the early SenchaCon’s and see how the market has been for us over the last few years. See if ANY of them have good things to say about the 5-dev minimum and what the impact has been on enterprise demand for Sencha-based solutions now that they’ve all been burned by the impossibility of finding individual Sencha devs to hire into their teams.
Someone must have been telling Mr. Popov that Ext JS is selling great and there’s no need to make any changes. This is false. Ext JS popularity has been severely declining for the past few years mostly due to uncompetitive pricing and poor marketing.
I think the biggest problem is the half-baked support for open source. Enterprises don’t want to build, buy, or contract Sencha-powered applications as long as the market for hiring Sencha-experienced developers is so illiquid.
Where does Sencha/IDERA imagine new experienced Sencha developers come from? Shops that already have 5+ developers training them? That’s pretty much the only source right now, and those folks are hard to hire off.
Trailing GPL releases, complete lack of a process for pull requests, 5 developer minimums — these are all aggressive moves AGAINST individual developers ever picking up Sencha to learn on their own. It doesn’t matter how great the framework is (and I do think it is great and still has a huge technical advantage), but maintaining open-source projects built on Sencha is an uphill battle in every direction and Sencha has no care to support what I’m doing. We have to fix framework bugs ourselves and no one wants to invest their own time in learning it.
There is nothing ahead but a death spiral without some radical change in policies that make it worthwhile for individual developers to learn Sencha and use it for their hobby and small projects over the increasingly-capable genuinely-open-source options. Make money by adding value to the commercial offerings, not subtracting value from the open-source offerings.
I could not agree with this more. I was an independent developer when I started using ExtJS and I would have never considered ExtJS as an option if it was not for the GPL license. Today we see there is a whole new generation of developers who are not considering ExtJS because of Sencha’s neglect of single developers and their GPL releases, if they’ve even heard of Ext JS in the first place.
My recent experiences in the job market reinforce this view of the current trend. There are some high paying Ext JS jobs out there… if you are willing to relocate across the country. There is a scarcity on both sides: There aren’t many Ext JS jobs out there, but there aren’t many candidates with experience for the Ext JS jobs that are available. That’s unsustainable. Employers are going to question the wisdom of sticking with a framework with such a small pool of experienced developer candidates. And experienced developers are going to have to question if sticking with a framework they know and love could amount to a black hole on their resume when it’s time to find their next job.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing I discovered in my job search is that almost nobody has even heard of Sencha or Ext JS anymore. And that’s not just recruiters; It’s also the people doing the technical interviews. Ext JS doesn’t occupy a lesser spot in the “which JavaScript framework should I choose in 2017” discussions. It is completely absent. No amount of marketing is going to change that. It can only change by inspiring organic enthusiasm in the developer community.
It has been hell trying to find qualified ExtJS developers who didn’t want an insane annual salary. It’s driven us to look outside of the country for contractors…and there’s still only a few available and rates are high because it’s now a niche library. There’s A LOT of work to do on the part of Idera.
I just notice that cash man Art Landro was replaced by Randy Jacops, another product of venture capital.
‘Work with general partners to evaluate portfolio companies and recommend programs to improve cash flow and EBITDA etc…’
I do not delude myself about the future of sencha, we all know how venture works.
So far Mr. Popov has not done much to increase popularity of Sencha products.
Interest in Ext JS has been steadily declining for several years.
Prices should be cut at least by 25% and remove the uncompetitive 5-pack purchase requirement to increase interest In Ext JS.
I appreciate all the comments. There is a lot of work ahead, but wanted to address some key concerns. In fact, I think that many are related.
The community is very vocal in requesting better Individual or Single License purchase options. We heard this loud and clear and are actively evaluating alternatives. I hope that we can address very soon.
Making the product more accessible to learn and work on open source projects is another important concern. While the current GPL approach addresses some of these needs, it also has some significant shortcomings. Our objective is to regain the popularity of the Ext JS, so that there are more experienced developers out there, building amazing applications. I anticipate that this will not be a quick fix, but it will be a continued priority.
Community is critical to the success of Ext JS. We have an established approach at Embarcadero from which to learn. For example, we love our MVP community and work very closely with them. We embrace an open approach to technology innovation in which our technology partners actively enrich the product and we heavily promote them. There are things that maybe different for Sencha and Ext JS that we need to understand, but fueling the community with renewed energy will be fundamental. You can help us here immediately by continuing to promote the framework you love and demonstrating its power through your work
We hear a lot of questions about this or that product. We love great products. The fact that you are passionate about them indicates that there is a lot of value that they deliver. This is exactly why we are so excited about Sencha.
Sencha has already lost so much ground that the only successful path forward that I see is making Ext JS completely open source. Don’t reduce the prices: eliminate them. Then drastically increase the prices on the value added services and products like support contracts, Architect, etc.
There is no happy compromise on pricing between developers who hit the “continue trial” button on their favorite editor rather than pay $50 for a license and the kind of enterprise shops who drop hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on Oracle licenses. The enterprise shops will pay whatever it costs and most single developers aren’t going to pay anything, regardless of cost.
I completely agree with Bill. Ext JS open source could generate a massive surge of interest and community contribution. Ext JS has the most inclusive support for many technologies that one who is not using ExtJS would need to source through many different libraries.
That’s actually my real name. I’m used to getting jokes about it and it never bothers me, but I wish you hadn’t done it here because this is a discussion that will affect the future of a lot of developers.
I think you should raise the license minimum from 5 to 10. It would definitely get rid of some of these trolls who like to repeat this same mantra over and over.
>>> I think you should raise the license minimum from 5 to 10
Good one!
The 5 plan killed off the community and made Sencha products very uncompetitive. Removing this restriction is by far the most repeated, consistent and uniform feedback provided by the remaining community.
You are the only troll here. People are talking about a major concern.
I’ve been using Extjs since the very beginning, and still using the latest versions. There are 2 things i am interested in the future of products:
1) As all the others say, pricing policy is a killer. It must change asap.
2) Modern toolkit should support all classic toolkit features and use recent css&js technologies.
3) One thing lacked in extjs so far is great looking themes. Latest material theme is very good, however the others are far from latest design principles, especially for desktop.
Hi,
We’re excited to announce the release of Ext JS 6.5.2 and Sencha Cmd 6.5.2. To learn more, read the blog (link below), try it out and let us know your comments.
https://staging.sencha.com/blog/announcing-ext-js-6-5-2-sencha-cmd-6-5-2-ga/
Funny. Still no mention of GXT anywhere in these statements. You should at least tell paying customers that they will no longer receive support.
There’s hardly *any* support in the Sencha forum since IDERA’s acquisition.
I’m agree with all who says about killing policy with extjs pricing
Only one way is to use old GPL versions breaking licence
=(
Is there any official statement regarding GXT future?
download the latest versions of shareit app and enjoy using it..
The same story with Sencha GXT 4/5; nice product but, but this doesn’t justify the enormous price of $4,475 … We have build prototypes with several versions and like the technical parts, but with our relative small projects our investor doesn’t improve any Sencha request.
Then Sencha stopped talking about GXT altogether (in news and roadshows) …
Change the license structure back to one normal license and resume development and we’ll resume working with it right away …
yes i am a angular js developer i like this post thanks for this.