The third day of Ext Conference 2009 was only a half-day, which turned out to be a good thing given the trainwreck start. They were an inexcusable 20 minutes late in opening the door for what should have been 15 minutes of closing remarks. Instead, it turned into a 30+ minute demo of the new UI designer. Yes, the designer is awesome and will rock the ext world, but it is beyond me why they would improvise a demo on the morning of the last day. This should have been either on day one or possibly part of Jack’s keynote on day two.

With events now running 45 minutes late, the final two sessions ended up being pretty disorganized. I went to the “Mainframe to Web” presentation by Rich. I had just done a similar project and was interested in what he had to say. Turns out their showcase pretty much faked an integration with the backend by using a screen scraper on the server side which translated terminal session screens to ExtJS metadata. They didn’t change any of the backend code at all. I’ll give them credit for finding a clever solution, but I’m not convinced it is the best one. When we confronted a similar problem, we ended up wrapping backend functionality in AS/400 stored procedures we called from the middle-tier.

The positive side effect of the wheels-off schedule was that Rich rushed his presentation to try and wrap up on time. The other presentation, ExtJS deployment, was only halfway done, so I jumped in to catch the last half of it. In this case, it seemed like the heart of the presentation was in the last half, so I basically got the best of both presentations.

The deployment presentation covered a lot of the useful tools for bundling up your JavaScript. I had heard of JS Builder before, but plan on taking a deeper look now. It can create a single JavaScript file from many smaller files. YUI Compressor is the recommended tool for really putting the squeeze on your JavaScript files, but even then, Jamie still recommended ensuring you use GZip/Deflate on the web server for JavaScript files. He also talked about a tool for creating a multi-image sprite file of several small images that can also have a big impact. I came away with a lot of things to research and this should be a top presentation to check out when they put them online.

The final session for the day was Scott covering the Ext.Writer. This has got to be one of the coolest features of ExtJS 3.0 and they really should have moved this earlier rather than waiting for the last minute. The Writer addresses the problem of handling CRUD operations for Stores. It can use REST-like URLs like /app/update/1 or /app/delete/1 with the record ID as the final parameter. It pushes a JSON object back to the server containing the information that needs to be acted on. It even addresses passing a primary key back to the Store on a create operation. This is looking a whole lot cooler than Ext.Direct and I want to give it a try for my application.

I didn’t sit through the final Q&A session as I needed to bugout for the airport. Based on the tweets so far, it doesn’t look like much was discussed. Overall, the conference was excellent and I can chalk up the final day to growing pains. What will be interesting to see is what happens in the coming weeks. Ext.Direct was talked up in about every session, but there is an incredible lack of detail for how it will be implemented with mainstream enterprise technologies (Java/C#). Abe talked about the Marketplace, which sounds like the equivalent of RubyForge for ExtJS. If they can get it up, it will be cool. Finally, the UI Designer is what everyone really wants but it is slated for v3.1, and no one would talk timelines for it.

After the 100mph pace yesterday, day two of the conference settled in to a comfortable 55mph. The big news of the day was during the keynote, when they released RC1 of ExtJS 3.0. Jack was the scheduled keynote speaker, but I get the impression he doesn’t like speaking in front of large groups. His keynote lasted all of five minutes. He covered the history of ExtJS in two minutes and said ExtJS 3.0 is here. And that was it. Abe was left scrambling to fill a rather large hole in the schedule, and he called up Darrell of the GXT (Ext GWT) team to talk about their v2.0 release.

Darrell is a nice guy, but I was ready to pull my hair out listening to him. I had lunch with him yesterday and to say he is excited about GWT is a major understatement. In spite of being a Java guy, I don’t like the idea of writing my web UI in Java. It’s like the Hibernate mafia who think you can write a database application without knowing SQL. Each of the tiers has a best-in-breed language for addressing that tier’s problems. An enterprise developer better know SQL for talking to databases, Java/C# for the middle tier and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front end.

After the keynote, we had another smoothie break. The smoothies were good, but the general consensus would have preferred coffee in the morning and smoothies in the afternoon.

Aaron kicked off the regular sessions with a breakdown of the signature demo in ExtJS 3.0 — Image Organizer. This is the meatiest demo so far, and was interesting to see how they structured the code and where they subclassed. The application uses Ext.Direct, but the backend was only PHP. One of the first questions Aaron got asked was when they would release other backends. He really danced around the question without giving a true answer, saying that maybe there would be something released in the next week or so. Ext.Direct is starting to sound like a lot of vaporware. They talk a good game of how it will be able to use annotations/attributes server side for exporting objects and other cool stuff, but no one is producing any code. Ext.Direct is the new Duke Nukem Forever.

The next session I attended was one of the funniest. Glen Liptka talked about user experience design with ExtJS. He is at Marketo, which has done the most incredible theming of ExtJS I have ever seen. He started the talk covering general usability and then demonstrated their application. The point he made that stuck with me is that your UI should have low WTF/min. Everyone got a kick out of that.

Next up was JC Bize talking about theming ExtJS. JC is the author of the Slate theme, one of the most popular third-party themes used in ExtJS. He is now an employee of Ext, LLC, so hopefully we’ll see some more cool themes in the pipeline. He showed off a couple cool themes and then got in to a basic example of how to change the theme of a panel. When playing with themes, Firebug is your friend. Unfortunately, he got sidetracked trying to answer an audience question and the presentation fizzled out.

I couldn’t catch the last session, as I had to make a phone call, but came back for the day-ending Ask the Ext Team. Nothing major came up. I tried to ask the question of why they didn’t use Sizzle for Ext Core, but my question didn’t get voted up and they ended the session before they got to it.

The day wrapped up with a social down by the pool with a cash bar. I really started to hate the Ritz after paying $8 for a beer. They definitely need to move the conference to someplace that understands Happy Hour. I managed to corner Aaron at the social and got my Sizzle question answered. He said they didn’t use Sizzle because it was too big and too slow. He did say the DOJO guys were working on a very cool new engine called Acme that looks promising. DOJO makes me nauseous just looking at it, so I won’t be investigating it.

The day ended for me again at the bar. I had dinner with another attendee who works at the DIA. Since I have a similar background, we had a lot to talk about. $35 for two margaritas and a plate of chicken quesadillas — ouch!

Day three is only a half day, but there are still two sessions I’m interested in, so it should be fruitful.