Sencha Conference 2010

WOW!  Thats the only way I can start this off.  Sencha Conference 2010 was in San Francisco at the Fairmont hotel.  The hotel was very nice and was able to accommodate the 500 conference attendees.  It was a little pricey but the quality was there.

The sessions were great and Sencha Team presented were very well rehearsed and looked that like had been giving large presentations for years!! In my opinion the best presenter was Ed Spencer, I think his accent helps him come off as a better presenter. :)

The conference started off with two major announcements from Abe Elias.

1. Sencha Touch is now free for commercial use.  In a later session it was revealed that there will be a charts package.  Available for purchase separately.
   
2. ExtJS 4 Beta will be released in approximately 6 weeks. (Of course no one should help them to exact date, things happen).  If they make a 6 week beta released I will ecstatic.

Amongst the attendees of the conference in my opinion and probably many others were some of the greatest minds in the JavaScript community, of course this also includes the Sencha team.

On the ExtJS 4 front, one of the last session I was able to attend was one that previewed some improvements that are coming in ExtJS 4.  One of these things included Jamie Avins showing a speed test of how long it took ExtJS 2, which is speedier in some aspects to ExtJS 3, to resize a window with 500 textfields, it took aprox 2-3 seconds...after consulting the community and doing some research of their with help from google speed tracer they were able to get the time down to millisecons.  Thats right milliseconds!!!

Theming ExtJS 4 will be sooooo much easier. With the help of compass (http://compass-style.org/).  changing the base color of the theme will be a simple single line of code.  Even stylizing buttons will be simple using compass.  I am looking forward to seeing themes that make ExtJS not look like ExtJS.  And I have a feeling with the new system we will all start seeing this.

I am not the greatest of writers so I will stop here.  But will make another blog post once the ExtJS Beta is released.

Brighthouse, yeah no....

Well after my last blog post you'll notice that I had a comment from someone at BrightHouse asking for information to see if they could be of help.  I sent them my information and within a couple of days received a phone call form a customer service supervisor.  She followed up with me a couple times to let me know what was going on but I only spoke with her once on the phone,  and the other times she left a voicemail.

Now the last voicemail I received from her said that they they found the issue and were replacing a hub in the area to fix said issue.  She stated that the replacement would be done by the end of the week and that I would receive a phone call form the area supervisor Bill Harris by sunday when the hub was supposed to be replaced.  I was also told that I would receive a phone call from Bill Harris early on last week but never received a phone call from him.  I was also told that the woman who I was speaking with was going on vacation until this past Sunday and would follow up with me on Sunday.  It is no 6:15 Eastern Time and I have yet top receive a phone call from anyone, and guess what my internet speeds are still not what they should be.

Being that I was told things would be fixed by the end of the week and come saturday they weren't I called BrightHouse and was told there was work done in the area so they cannot confirm that this is an ongoing issue, so they would have to send a service tech out yet AGAIN to check the signal levels.  While on the phone I mentioned I was supposed to get a phone call from Bill Harris to let me know where things were at..they looked at the account and told me that Bill Harris had called me on tuesday and told me he would follow up with me on Sunday......The only person from brighthouse I received a phone call from on tuesday was the customer service supervisor.  So I asked the support person on the phone are they sure it says Bill Harris & they confirmed thats what it said. So not sure whats going on there.

So the service tech comes out  Saturday afternoon and checks the levels and of course they are fine.  While he is here I was commenting how this was an on going issue now for almost 4 months and that every time I call they want to classify it as a separate and new problem, the service tech states "Yeah we;ve been getting alot of calls for this area, and some of them we just ignore".  WOW!  I didnt say anything to him about that because I wasnt about to start any other trouble than I already have.

So once the signal level check was complete and no problems were found the service tech went out to the tab and checked the connections there, which were fine.  Well since he couldnt find any issues and had his next service call one block over in my subdivision he calls someone and they told him it was an ongoing issue in the neighborhood.  So the service tech gets told after and unnecessary documented issue in the area that he really shouldnt have been dispatched out here......WOW 

I AM STILL NOT GETTING WHAT I PAYED FOR AND BRIGHTHOUSE IS NOTHING BUT A HOUSE WITH ITS LIGHTS OUT AT THIS POINT EVERYONE IS WALKING AROUND IN THE DARK AND HAS NO CLUE WHAT ANYONE ELSE IS DOING.  SO NOW I AM GOING TO TRY AND GO UP THE CORPORATE LADDER.

If anyone reading this has a phone number or an email address of someone other than a customer service supervisor or call center please send it my way.  Myself as well as the other in my subdivision would really appreciate it.

Bright House FAIL!!

So I am going into month 4 of slow internet speeds.  He is my most recent test.  Granted its not a bright house speed test but they dont allow for a direct image output of the results....I wonder why.  But the speedtest on http://speedtest.cfl.rr.com   show pretty much the same thing.

So yeah month 4 of my neighborhood having slow speeds, numerous tech's  have been made, and they come to the houses in the neighborhood and say none of the tests they run show any issues, so they put in what they are referring to as a "maintenance call"  basically this is a way for them to leave without fixing the problem.  Supposedly a part has been on order now for over 3 weeks.  Yet most of the tech guys that have come out say any part that needs to be replaced should  already be in stock.  so who knows what is going on.

Been doing some heavy ExtJS development

So for the past couple of months I have been doing some heavy ExtJS work. Nothing too fancy, no extension development....but some real heavy use of Ext and some 3rd party extensions.

The backend of the application I am working on is PHP, and I have come up with a psuedo framework for the application itself. By using the __autoload() functions in PHP and passing a couple of standardized arguments for every ajax call whether it be a submitting of a form or loading a data store for a grid/combo Ext component. Through Ext lovely use of the xtype property I am able to create arrays in my PHP Objects json_encode() them and pass them back to the front end where they become full fledged objects....this is not a standard practice for the interface but it is used in a specific element of the application that is very dynamic and very custom. Now I am sure if I found some Ext developers in my area and could sit down with them and show them the application they could do away with PHP generating the code and come up with a couple of extensions to do exactly what I want, but for now PHP is filling in the gaps and doing exactly what I want.

I originally started looking at ExtJS when version 1 was released, then version 2 came out and I started on a project at my former location, but never really was given the time to actually fully develop an application using Ext...then a couple of months ago I started on the current project I am working on and presented the idea of using Ext to my boss, he said I could proceed and I think overall everyone has been very happy with it.

Somethings I have seen improve for each release of Ext. I am going to start with the items that I have seen the biggest change in and work down to those that have changed but maybe not that much. Of course these are just my opinions

* Documentation
* Speed
* Overall Community Support
* UI Reliability


Documentation- The documentation has GREATLY improved and since the release of 3.0 I have started to see more and more examples of code in documentation itself. One thing that is still lacking just a little is an overall explanation of the properties/config options/methods/etc... for an object....some of these have a great amount of explanation and others not so much. Of course you can likely find someone to give a little bit more information on #extjs on irc.freenode.net but I think such details should be in the documentation. One thing I would love to see in the documentation along with the curret code example, is an actual working element produced from the code example, I know there are examples, but having everything in one place is a great thing to have and not all classes that have code in the documentation have samples...although most of them do.

Speed- The speed of Ext overall has increased SIGNIFICANTLY and I dont think there is anyone out there that is using Ext that could ask for more speed improvements although I am sure the team is working on them.

Overall Community Support- I have see the community grow in leaps and bounds for Ext, this past year was the first Ext Conference, and although I moved to Florida just in time for it, unfortunately I was getting married later that month and with starting the new job and having to take time off for the wedding/honeymoon I as unable to attend. I believe this years conference, if there is going to be one, will be in California as that is where the new Ext office is located (figures I come to town and everyone leaves!) Going with community tow books have come out recently The "Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook" and a not yet released in paper back form but available but available through Manning Publishing's MEAP program "Ext JS in Action" these has both bean great reads so far and I would highly suggest for anyone involved in Ext development to purchase them.

UI Reliability-  This one really isnt an improvement but something negative that I am starting to see I have noticed a couple of UI bugs creaping in and out of the 3.x releases such as, tabs not having the site images, a form having trouble placing buttons correctly and having them cut off on the left hand side.  Now  the tabs issue was corrected with the release of 3.2 but the 3.2 release introduced the buttons issue, which I believe is my fault in that I have not set the proper config options for my objects but it was working correctly in 3.1 and now is showing up in 3.2


But overall Ext is great and the changes they have been/are making to the release cycle are going to help the overall package shine like no other.