ExtJS vs. jQueryUI

Question

I recently had the experience of doing the same (search combo box) with jquery and extjs. I found that extjs are bugs and too complicated. On the contrary, I found that jquery works very well and is very simple. I am wondering what other people have experience with using extjs. Are extjs complexity you buying something?

Answer 1

They are not comparable to imho.

jQuery UI is just a combination of several widgets that can be used together but are not really integrated or anything else. Pretty flexible, pretty fast, but not a complete set of widget tools.

ExtJS is a full-text toolkit for web applications that is comparable to most GUI toolkits in terms of features. yes it is useful, but it is also very complex and very large / slow. So IMHO depends on what you need. For a normal interface, I would never use ExtJS, since it is too big and slow. But for the admin panel or something big, where it actually adds a lot of convenience, yes, please.

Just try creating something like this using jQuery UI: http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/totals.html

In addition, with ExtJS, you can even design interfaces using the drag and drop interface these days: http://www.sencha.com/products/designer/download.php

Size Comparison:

JQuery

• jquery-1.4.2.min.js : 70.5KiB
• jquery-ui-1.8.5.min.js : 199.5KiB
• Total: 270KiB

Ext:

• ext-all.js : 697.7KiB
• ext-base.js - 26.5KiB
• Total: 724.2KiB