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Comment by Joe8Bit | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that in such an otherwise complete account of ExtJS that so little is made of the rise (and subsequent fall) of jQuery.

The author rightfully talks about some of the (terrible) decisions made by the frameworks owners, that pushed folks from the community; but (imo) the greater effect was the rise of jQuery, which embraced an open source model ExtJS scorned and built a staggeringly large community which pulled many folks from ExtJS.

It's a rather naive view, but Google Trends data from 2004 to now[0] tells a VERY good version of this story

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=jquery,E...

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jQuery is dom traversal and manipulation (with a common ajax interface) - ExtJS is (was) a UI framework. It's an apples and oranges comparison - I worked on several ExtJS projects, all of which used jQuery for one thing or another. I think it's actually pretty accurate to say that frameworks like angular are more responsible for its decline since their feature sets are much more similar.

What about jQuery UI? We used that extensively back in the day. According to Wikipedia, its first release date was back in 2007.

http://jqueryui.com/

That is all technically correct (best kind). But that’s not how it’s viewed by the scores of people new to web development. Broadly speaking, you can use both to create a dynamic UI, just at very different levels of abstraction. And at the time when an ExtJS license cost hundreds of dollars and jQuery was picking up pace and was proper FOSS, someone new to web development would be much more likely to reach for jQuery.

The problem with jQuery was that it was almost good enough: it has a system of plugins which were abused to no end to make things like morals and calendars and whatnot. And then there was jQuery UI which promised all the loveliness if jQuery but for UI (I still shake a little when I remember it).

jQuery was and still is great as a helper for “I want to show/hide this thing on the page”. It’s just the show/hide behavior can quickly morph into 2-4K lines of spaghetti code manipulating all the UI and having all the business logic built in.

interesting autocorrect modals to morals.

Of course you're right, and maybe I phrased it poorly, my intention was to highlight the jQuery eco-system as the main puller of folks from ExtJ e.g. jQueryUI and the 10,000's of jQuery plugins that replicated ExtJS/Sencha functionality several dozen times over (with various levels of quality).

Angular certainly didn't kill ExtJS. I was on a project that tried to move from Ext to Angular 1. UI-grid alone forced us to stay with Ext. Add in all the other Ext components and moving to Angular along with re-creating everything simply didn't make financial sense.

For what it's worth, I think they later re-wrote in React and integrated the Ext grid in that.

You need to tell google how to interpret the search terms by clicking each term and refining it via the dropdown. In your example, this is obvious because "reactjs" is a flat line at 0 which doesn't make sense.

I've somewhat fixed it here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0... but wasn't sure how to further specify Sencha.

Else Google Trends is worthless data unless you do this.

jQuery came to mind, but mainly because i only foggily remember ExtJS. I was actually thinking of the library that was widely popular before jQuery, the one it actually replaced - Prototype. While they compete in some way, jQueryUI is more similar to Ext than jQuery itself is.

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