Joe Lennon

Day one of the Source Dev conference has been great – things kicked off bright and early this morning with an 8am keynote from Sencha’s James Pearce and an announcement from Aditya Bansod of Sencha’s new cloud services product line, Sencha.io. Some interesting points on the roadmap included:

• ExtJS 4.1 will be released at some point this summer, with another 4.x release later this year
• Sencha Touch 2 preview will be available at some point in the summer, with a final release targeted for Q3 2011

I get the impression that work has not started yet on Sencha Touch 2, but Sencha are gathering some ideas for changes and new features. It should be exciting to see what they come up with, especially given how amazing the first version of the product is!

The next session I attended was Ed Spencer‘s “Introducing ExtJS 4″ presentation. I have been following closely the progress with ExtJS 4, but this talk really cleared up some clear benefits of using the new version. Ed even went as far as to do some live coding in the session, illustrating how the new dynamic loading and MVC features make organizing and structuring an ExtJS application much more manageable. It was also great to see some Sencha SDK tools in action – these are going to make a huge difference when it comes to deployable high-performance production applications.

Following on from the Sencha.io announcement in the keynote, I had to attend Aditya’s session on the same topic to find out more. Right now, Sencha have made a commercial product from the tinySrc labs project, enabling developers to serve up much smaller image files to devices, without needing to create multiple versions of an image manually. More exciting was the announcement that freemium services for doing similar things with JavaScript and CSS files is on the way. This covers Sencha.io Src, but there is also the concept of Sencha.io Sync, which is in invite-only beta right now. It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, but it seems to offer a means of storing data locally in an application to eradicate latency issues, sync’ing the data back to a central Sencha server when possible, and then replicating this data across devices. There was a cool demo of a crossword application, with changes made in a browser session updating immediately in a separate browser. Definitely one to watch, this!

The next session I attended was Jozek Sakalos (Saki from Sencha forums) speaking about how to write large applications. He had some good advice for developers regarding planning and organizing your projects before you start coding. I would have liked to see more ExtJS-specific and practical examples, but unfortunately time was pressing.

James Pearce was up again next for a talk on Theming and Sass. As someone who has done quite a bit of work with Sencha Touch recently, I am very familiar with Sencha’s use of Sass and Compass, and James’ presentation was very interesting. I learned some good tips about where to go to find all the different variables available for Sencha Touch theming, and it was great to find out about how theming works in ExtJS 4 and in the new ExtJS charts. I have to say James is a great speaker, very clear and to the point. At one point, James said that HTML5 is “a badge for the way the Web is changing”. With his permission, I might have to use that quote in HTML5 In Action, as I think it sums it up perfectly for me.

Went for lunch with my colleagues Darragh Duffy and Jonathan Reardon, and got to meet Martha Rotter, a developer from Dublin. Later at a coffee break I also got to meet Denis and Ian from EMC in Cork – great to see some Irish developers working with Sencha products. We’ll have to start a user group or something! Lunch was great, some really nice food – strangely enough coffee was not included though. Martha kindly sorted us out on that front though, so our caffeine needs were soon fulfilled!

After lunch, I attended Nils Dehl‘s talk on Ext.data and Ext.Direct. Nils uses Prezi for his presentations, and it really works well when showing large blocks of code samples.

The day wrapped up with Jay Garcia‘s presentation on creating extensions, plugins and components. I had an idea that Jay knew a lot about ExtJS (he wrote the book on it, after all) but I had really no appreciation for just how much knowledge of the underpinnings this guy has. He really cleared up a lot of things for me in relation to the differences between ExtJS 3 and 4 class systems and how loading works. I’m really looking forward to reading ExtJS 4 In Action and Sencha Touch In Action when they are published.

Looking forward to meeting more Sencha developers at tonight’s party, and hopefully day 2 of this conference will be as good as today was! If you’re at the conference and want to have a chat, send me a tweet or DM – I’m @joelennon on Twitter.