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Add to SafariWhen comparing ExtJS vs NativeScript, the Slant community recommends NativeScript for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing Windows Mobile apps with web technologies?” NativeScript is ranked 2nd while ExtJS is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose NativeScript is:
Used by Svelte framework for native development.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Provides built in support for UI widgets
Huge amount of widgets available, also easy to build custom widgets by extending the available components.
Pro Professional support available
If you buy a license you can get professional support and premium forums. Support has short contact times and solutions are of great value.
Pro Well documented
ExtJS' documentation is very detailed and helpful. All concepts and parts of the framework are thoroughly explained.
Pro IDE plugins available
Plugins are available for JetBrains, Eclipse and Visual Studio.
Pro Easy reusability of code
By using the packages and custom components, code can be reused very simply.
Pro Flat learning curve
Anyone with basic JavaScript knowledge can start using this framework.
Pro Forum support
Forum support is available.
Pro Excellent design tools
Eg: Sencha Architect.
Pro Developer friendly integrated tools
Sencha Cmd, Sencha Inspector and some IDE plugins etc., are the tools which helps developers to speed up their development.
Pro Svelte Native
Used by Svelte framework for native development.
Pro Leverages knowledge in Angular
Angular is a very popular framework, and teams already developing angular will feel right at home with Nativescript + Angular
Pro Works great with vue.js
Cons
Con Completely unreliable with regard to licensing and pricing
That ExtJs is expensive is not the problem, but what they did is started completely free, then switched the licensing model when they had profited from the community. Also, they suddenly switched from a single user license to a minimum of 5 users.
Con License
Ext-JS is not for free, it comes with a license.
Con Large footprint
The library is almost 500Kb in size hence significantly affects your page load time.
Con Expensive licensing
ExtJS is free for use in open source projects, but you have to use the unstable version which is riddled with bugs. Furthermore, to build a project (even if it's open source), you have to buy their proprietary tools.
For commercial projects, it costs $665 for a license.
Con No real support
You only get a limited premium questions that could be answered via the support and if the issue is too large then you might lose all your credits (it has a credit system for support) in one question.
In addition the replies in premium forum are sometimes less thought of than you would get in stackoverflow.
Con Lots of bugs
The community is very small and this is because the licencing is very expensive. Therefore not many people to test the framework and give feedback in order to fix.
They try to do everything in house which means that a small company (linkedin shows about 100 employees) tries to imitate something very large.
The scaling problems lead to lots of bugs and instability.
Con No web-workers
ExtJS does not take into account the asynchronous nature of todays web browsers where you can do heavy stuff on the background.
Con Tooling is poor
They had a GUI architect tool, but that tool never was up to date with the current framework version. Now they even seem to have abandoned the whole architect app. Also, to build a ExtJs app you have to use their tool (and then you have to pay, from that moment ExtJs is no longer GPL). But this tool also has lots of bugs.
Con Steep learning curve
ExtJs is a very opinionated framework. You have to do it the ExtJs way or it's the highway. So, a lot of time, things in your own opinion doesn't make sense or don't work in the way you expect it.
Con Quantity yes, quality no
There is a large amount of source code that can be useful and indeed all the samples works flawlessly.
When you try to get into more complex scenarios you will find yourself in situations where things just do not work as expected. You will have to do manual work.
Con Nativescript + Angular apps for Android tend to have long startup times.
It's very difficult to have acceptable startup times with NS+Angular in Android. It's not uncommon to see apps taking 6 sec or more to start AFTER having been optimized with Webpack (mandatory!). The same app in iOS takes only 2-3 sec. Also, this seems to happen only with the NS+Angular flavour. People using plain NS (without Angular) don't seem to have the issue.
