ExtJS vs Sencha Touch for RIA

Question

I'm trying to bootstrap a Rich Internet Application, which will have a complex canvas (think: Visio), and should work according to these principles:

• it would run in a browser
• it would run on a tablet (Android or other)
• supports complex drawing, drag & drop etc.
• runs on its own (eg. without a server component) happily
• can leverage conventional & touch UI as needed - user can draw a line with a mouse or using the touchscreen

I was thinking about using a Javascript framework and found ExtJS, whose demos I quite like and checking the API docs it seems it supports all the low level GUI stuff I need (think: Ext.draw package, especially Ext.draw.Sprite).

But then I also found Sencha Touch, which seems to be leveraging the same technology stack, only for the mobile. However the API is much more limited (no Ext.draw available), and only runs in Webkit browsers, as far as I can understand. But it supports touch-based interaction.

Is there a way to create an app that works in a browser but can also be "compiled" to native mobile/tablet code (eg. with PhoneGap)? Or is this just a dream and these two cannot mix at the moment?

PS. checked the other similar questions but they seem to be quite out of date.

Answer 1

Extjs is for desktop application, while Sencha touch & touch charts are for mobile, eg. tablet or Android.

@JunkMyFunk is right, you'd only be able to reuse 50% of your code at most.

The definition of class is not the same between Extjs and sencha touch which means currently you can't mix Extjs with sencha touch, the namespace will conflict if you do that way.

Answer 2

Short answer: it is currently just a dream I'm afraid.

Long answer: Sencha Touch and ExtJS share a lot of underlying logic and are somewhat similar, but I would say you'd only be able to reuse 50% of your code, at most, when trying to port one to the other.

jQuery Mobile and jQuery UI share similar issues at the moment - they have both created nice mobile UI frameworks, which only support webkit browsers, meaning there's no easy way of developing rich apps that run in desktops and on mobile platforms. Hopefully these projects will merge their mobile and desktop frameworks at some point in the future to allow us to create apps that can be deployed across both without a massive rewrite. There will always be differences in the way mouse and touch screen events work but I wish that was the only thing we had to consider.