The 2015 SenchaCon conference took place last week in Silicon Valley, with a host of exciting announcements about what’s in the pipeline for web and mobile app development. As assessed by the CNX staff in attendance, here are the top five most interesting tid-bits for the Valence community to come out of the show:
- Ext JS 6 will be one combined framework for both desktop and mobile This is probably the biggest news of the conference, that the much talked-about convergence of mobile (Sencha Touch) and desktop (Ext JS) will finally arrive this summer in the new Ext JS framework. This means developers can create “universal” apps that run on all platforms, as all of the Sencha Touch framework’s mobile support will be integrated into Ext JS 6. Ext JS 6 is expected to be released in June, and we are planning to include it in the Valence 4.2 release scheduled for this fall.
- Grids will soon include a new “spreadsheet” selection model The Ext JS grids are among the most heavily used components in business apps, particularly within Valence. This update to the grid component will allow users to select a range of cells, or specific rows or columns. The grids’s selection model would then allow your programs to easily pull the selected ranges. This means users accustomed to selecting ranges in spreadsheet apps like Excel can apply the same concepts to Valence apps.
- Ext JS 6 brings a whole new look and feel (theme), while the old ones will still remain Theming is what gives developers the ability to quickly customize the look and feel of a Valence application, such as the “Crisp” and “Neptune” themes. Ext JS 6 will bring even more pre-packaged themes to help give your apps a unique, modern flair.
- Much faster theming changes will be possible using a new process called “Fashion” Sencha will be revamping theme development with the introduction of Fashion, a JavaScript-based implementation of a SASS compiler, which means SASS changes will be recompiled in the browser in real time. This means theme changes will be reflected nearly instantaneously during development.
- JetBrains plugin for Ext will be released soon For Valence developers who use JetBrains IDEs such as WebStorm, Sencha will introduce a first-party plug-in this June. The plug-in will feature “intellisense” for configs, which means, for instance, the IDE will know that a valid config on a grid is “store”. It will also have the ability to auto-generate columns for your grids based on the grid’s store, much as you can do in Sencha Architect. The plug-in will also auto-create methods for events, automatically inserting the parameters passed by the event. Watch for news on this plug-in’s release sometime in June.