Ongoing Extjs support

[brianf]

Our long term goal is to migrate from a pure extjs ui over to a gwt implementation so we can use your designer. Naturally the fallout over the license change raises a few issues. Our plan was to start building the gwt-ext by hand until the designer could support everything we need. It seems like the gwt-ext might be a dead end now, or is risky at best. I see that 4.0 has some beta MyGWT support, which I assume would translate down the road into Ext Gwt support. Can someone from Instantiations comment on the roadmap for supporting the Extjs options?

[Eric Clayberg]

I see that 4.0 has some beta MyGWT support, which I assume would translate down the road into Ext Gwt support.

Read the GWT-Ext forum thread and you will see that we already offer very good GWT-Ext support.

[brianf]

Yes I saw that, but what I'm saying is that GWT-Ext seems to be on shakey ground right now given the license battles. Best case they continue on with 2.0.2 and that's not a very appealing option...so I'm wondering what the support for the Ext GWT (formerly MyGWT) will look like.

[Eric Clayberg]

We are planning to have full support for both MyGWT and GWT-Ext (in whatever form the latter might appear).

The current version of GWT Designer already has pretty good MyGWT support now.

[mkn]

Yes I saw that, but what I'm saying is that GWT-Ext seems to be on shakey ground right now given the license battles. Best case they continue on with 2.0.2 and that's not a very appealing option...so I'm wondering what the support for the Ext GWT (formerly MyGWT) will look like.

These couple of days have been a nightmare. I have been trying to find out what components I can happily combine in my web application I am writing. I got frustrated with some of the old ones I had chosen and now I when planning to move to GWT-Ext I see that has gone in two directions: GPL and a fairly pricey commercial license . Now I have a nice 50 dollar tool (GWT Designer) and cannot use the GWT Ext library from now on. Sigh. Back to the planning table.

Well, Instantiations is definitely not the one to blame. When one buys a commercial closed source product like GWT Designer one knows more or less what to expect but with an open source product anything may happen and in the worst case (been there twice) one may face a dead end.

[Eric Clayberg]

This is definitely a bizarre turn for the open source world. I don't think the final chapte rhas been written yet, so I'm not sure what will happen next.

We do have support for the current LGPL version of MyGWT and GET-Ext, but it looks like it would be a waste of effort to pursue those any farther.

We will likely add support for the Commercial/GPL EXT GWT version in the future once we are satisfied with how the license impacts us. We won't ever ship EXT GWT ourselves, but we will provide development time support for it in GWT Designer, so I don't know whether that triggers the GPL "binding" virus or not.

If you are building a commercial app, the $200 commercial license doesn't seem too bad given the time it can save. If you are building freeware or open source stuff, maybe the GPL license is OK for you.

[mkn]

If you are building a commercial app, the $200 commercial license doesn't seem too bad given the time it can save. If you are building freeware or open source stuff, maybe the GPL license is OK for you.

Well, the price is not the trouble. The trouble is that at least I cannot from now on really rely on ANY open source licensing model. What I will do in the future is create a matrix of all licensing models involved in any project and then tell the customer that I have no crystal ball - he will have to use his own. I have to spend hours and hours reading all the license.txt files, "what's new" items and googling an yahooing every possible thinkable combination of words associated with any given piece of software component I am using.

Five years ago I was faced with a problem like this and what I did then was write a RAD application framework of my own. That was a good solution and we wrote more than 300 applications using it (and it is actually still being heavily used by my former group). I think the outcome will be the ajax/gwt equivalent of the same process and there will be NO CODE from the public/almost public/nearly public / kind-of public libraries so there will be nothing to contaminate it.


Markku

[Eric Clayberg]

While this ExtJs license change is not good, I don't think it is very typical.

In fact, one of the reasons people are so pissed off by it is that it is so unusual.

[mkn]

In fact, one of the reasons people are so pissed off by it is that it is so unusual.

After my first frustrated reaction I had a good look at the new version and being plain Java it really shows a huge potential. It needs GWT 1.5 and Java 1.5+ and it has quite a few problems with the components which makes me classify it fairly useless at this point. However, once it is running well (and hopefully supported by GWT Designer) I will consider purchasing the package. The price is not much, especially considering the exchange rate of the poor old US dollar.

Now it is still a Beta running only on top of a beta platform, lacking much of the documentation, badly broken in many places and will not produce production quality code. But, yes, very interesting indeed.

Markku

[Eric Clayberg]

We do plan to support the new EXT GWT package with GWT Designer.