When comparing Sencha Ext JS vs Ember.js, the Slant community recommends Ember.js for most people. In the question“What are the best client-side JavaScript MV* frameworks?” Ember.js is ranked 4th while Sencha Ext JS is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Ember.js is:
Route handlers for the URLs can see a wide range of possible application states, asynchronous logic in the router makes sure of Promises. And implementing makes sense.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Comprehensive documentation
The Sencha documentation is comprehensive, with detailed documentation and a number of examples displaying the various widgets, tools and themes.
Pro Supports MVC and MVVM development
Pro Supports Web and Mobile deployment out of the one framework or codebase
Pro Support for easy theming of applications
Pro Visual Design tool available
The Sencha Architect product allows you to visually build your application, or rapidly prototype a system.
Pro IDE Plugins available
A number of plugins are available for some of the commonly used IDEs (eg: JetBrains, Eclipse, Visual Studio), providing templates, refactoring support, hinting and code completion/generation, as well as management of includes and other time-saving features.
Pro Charting package included
Pro Excellent routing
Route handlers for the URLs can see a wide range of possible application states, asynchronous logic in the router makes sure of Promises. And implementing makes sense.
Pro Increased performance because similar tasks are processed in one go
It batches bindings and DOM updates to increase performance; if similar tasks are added to a batch, the browser would only need to process them in one single go, as compared to re-computing for each task one at a time.
Pro The API is easy to understand
Ember's API are really easy to understand and work with. It has methods which allow you to harness complicated functionalities in an easy to understand way.
Pro Helps with writing simple and modular code by using Promises
Promises represent an eventual state in asynchronous logic. Having promises everywhere (almost) means you could write simple and modular code, using almost any API that Ember provides.
Pro Easy to understand documentation
The Ember Guides are well structured and very well written. The API documentation is also fantastic.
Pro Complete front-end stack
Ember is practically a complete full-stack front-end framework. It comes with it's own asset pipeline, router, services etc...
Pro Minimal need for configuration
Ember follows the philosophy of "convention over configuration" meaning that it already has almost everything configured for you, so you just have to start coding and developing your project right away.
Pro Built-in router
Ember comes with built-in routing capabilities. There's no need to install third-party plugins to be able to use routes.
Pro Debugging tool for almost every web browser
Ember also has a debugging tool called Ember Inspector which is used for debugging the client side of your app.
Pro Helps developers with keeping the structure of the application clean and simple
Ember already defines the general application structure and organization for you. This was done to prevent developers from making mistakes which would needlessly over-complicate their application. While it's still possible to go out of these practices forced to developers by the Ember authors, you still have to go out of your way to force them.
Pro Out-of-the-box CLI tool which scaffolds a new project
Ember-CLI is a very useful tool. With just a couple of commands it scaffolds the code, installs dependencies and finally compiles everything itself. It's very useful to quickstart an Ember project.
Pro Uses a relatively clean and easy to understand templating engine
Ember's preferred templating language is Handlebars. This is mainly because Handlebars is a logic-less templating language and Ember tries to keep it's logic outside the view.
Another reason why Ember benefits from Handlebars is mostly aesthetic as Handlebar's clean syntax makes for easier to read and understand templates.
Finally, Handlebars templates are compiled instead of interpreted, which means that they are much faster to load.
Pro Works great with jQuery
You can use any of jQuery’s features.
Pro Useful bindings
EmberJS provides with an extremely handy feature of advanced bindings. With this you can not only set the path to the binding value in your app but also set in which direction you want the changes to propagate to (oneway
, single
, multiple
etc).
Pro Can render the page according to any of the developer's needs because of computed properties
Having custom properties in your templates is itself a huge plus but having custom computed properties is an even greater benefit, since now you can code your custom function as a property and call it from your template. Hence rendering your page exactly according to your needs.
Pro Auto-updating templates
If you've used handlebars (Ember.js's templating is powered by HandleBars) helper tags in your code (like {{#each}}
) you won't have to worry about updating your template each time you add/remove data from your page, Handlebars will auto update your template for you.
Pro Stunning developer experience
You build products instead of constantly configuring the stuff.
Pro Uses Glimmer 2, a very fast template rendering engine
Glimmer 2, a new and very fast template rendering engine written in TypeScript, is fast due to smaller precompiled template sizes, faster parsing and initial render, and compiles at runtime to extremely efficient assembly-like append opcodes.
Pro Ember's Object model makes the framework extremely consistent
Most of Ember's components come from the Ember Object Model. It's the basis for views, controllers, models and even the framework itself. This means that the framework is extremely consistent since almost every component shares the same core functionalities and properties since they are all derived from the same object.
Pro Excellent data layer
Ember provides a built-in data layer, which makes it super simple to keep the UI in sync with the back end.
Pro Continually evolving
Ember has a great core team and community of developers who are continually improving, updating and evolving the framework. The Ember team is always planning ahead and implementing the best of the latest technologies and practices, while ensuring backwards compatability.
Cons
Con Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with
To do any meaningful development, you are stuck with CMD. There is a gulp task that will handle the JS concatenation, but there is nothing outside of CMD that can handle theming in their ecosystem.
In addition, CMD is based on Java, and is very heavy to run (600MB+ on Windows 10 to watch for changes in the application and recompile).
Con Sencha CMD (their CLI) is under documented, and out of date
Their latest release of CMD changed some configuration locations, but the documentation was not updated to reflect this. There is no reference guide on the json configuration files, other than the (unfortunate use of) comments in the generated json files.
Con They use proprietary extensions to SASS, making it incompatible with anything but their Fashion processor
On the plus side, you do not have to install ruby alongside CMD for more recent versions of ExtJS. However, their Fashion processor seems to only be available through CMD.
Con Too often breaking changes between versions. They have little concept of backwards compatibility
Compounded by the fact that there are now two "toolkits" in the same "version" of ExtJS, with certain components not existing in one vs the other.
Con The IDE tools are not sold separately - you must purchase the appropriate license pack
You get all the IDE plugins, even if you only need one. They should offer sell them individually, or continue to bundle them with a dev license pack.
Con Difficult to integrate with 3rd party software
Any third party library you wish to include has to be wrapped in some sort of component adapter. You have to do a lot of tweaking to get the build process right if you want the 3rd party lib to be bundled into your application in the right order.
Con Can be expensive
The framework is a commercial package, and the recent decision to start with a minimum of 5 users may rule out smaller developer teams or startups. Recently, they have started a program that allow essentially what are contractors to purchase single licenses, but not individual, independent developers.
Con Steep learning curve
Ember.js has a rather steep learning curve for beginners.
Con Too large for small projects
At 69Kb gzipped, it is one of the largest JavaScript frameworks. This means Ember might be an overkill to use on simpler projects.
Con More Ruby than JavaScript
It was written as a Ruby on Rails for JavaScript. Ends up being very frameworky and having tons of polyfills and unneeded abstractions.