HiveMinds

[Cshark]

Hey guys,
the current company I'm working with forced me to learn and work with extJs. Seems to me though, that while a good general purpose framework, the two dimensional nature of it is bugging the crap out of me.

Why do people feel this weird need to write and use frameworks?
Am I offbase or terribly old for thinking that it might be better just to write and re-use the code you need??? And it's not just extJs, it's the vast majority of them. These things are massive!

What do you think?
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[The Boy Hope]

Hmmm - I suppose it depends on your level of expertise. For some people it's easier to write what you need but for others it's not. They do tend to be a bit enormous though, I agree.

I might not use a framework for some things that a lot of people would do, but on the other hand I'm sometimes glad of the help. For example, map = new GMap2( document.getElementById( "map" ) ); is awfully nice and simple.
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[SoopahMan]

Frameworks definitely speed up coding when they're well-documented and thoroughly debugged. When they're less-so - like ExtJS - they speed up some tasks and slow down others.

Generally, there are a lot of things I'm tired of rewriting when I'm not using a framework for a project, like how to attach multiple onload events to window cross-browser, how to deal with some of the built-in methods of Array and other built-in objects missing in some browsers, traversing the DOM via CSS Selectors, loading and communicating with Flash cross-browser, injecting CSS rules, reading certain CSS properties that vary cross-browser, firing AJAX calls, manipulating and listening for browser history events... . These big frameworks are so far the answer, but it would be nice if they could generally decompose well to use very narrow slices when you need them. That hasn't happened yet, and generally the business model for doing a great job on these frameworks is just barely crawling right now - so there's not much out there to encourage a better decomposing framework to come into existence.

In the case of ExtJS though, one nice thing is how many places there are in it where you can ignore it - if it's not getting the job done, just do it your way and tie back into it where it would be helpful. That much is pretty easy to appreciate. Some examples are its ability to take on your own custom body HTML for controls, dump your own HTML into panels and other parts of the UI it draws for you, and the fact that basically everything can be overridden.

On the downside, doing these overrides can be quite the adventure. I had to patch one of its date classes and ultimately realized the code that needed patching was inside a function that writes a function that... writes another function. Wild wild west.

[Jason Gross]

I'm a fan of jQuery and Prototype (a bit heavy) -- they take all the work out of providing a common means for approaching DOM walking, "commonizing" the discrepencies in AJAX, providing extended ajax controls - everything Soops mentioned.

If someone else didn't do it, I'd be doing it - and lugging around my own set of "default routines to use" (ie., a framework) -- why reinvent the wheel?