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.
- 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.
- 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.
