I want to Rails and not to Javascript, or: Why ExtJS is not for me
Thursday, February 7th, 2008Ok, today I switched back to ‘traditional Rails’ at expense of ExtJS. The plan was to build the admin-interface of our new application in ExtJS but after 10 days of working with it I changed back to Rails, and this are the reasons:
- I want to Rails and not to Javascript!
The brain eating syntax of Javascript drives me crazy! Brackets here, braces there. I think it is a general danger ‘railing’. - The documentation! It is complete but the examples are really lacking. Why can’t they just give an example how the code of a simple ComboBox looks like?
- The big learning curve! Our project has to be released in May this year. I know I can do it in Rails, but not learning a different framework in this time.
- Error handling: It is such a pain! Even with Firebug you are not able to find and trace every error occuring!
- Speed: The browser hangs for a second initializing the application.
I won’t say ExtJS is dead for me. When the time comes I will re-learn it, but it’s definitely not the concept of rapid programming, and this is what I need this time! The progress I made the last ten days are out of all proportion to the time I used.