SenchaCon 2015

A few weeks ago I attended the SenchaCon2015 conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The SenchaCon conference is held every year and gives Sencha developers from around the world the opportunity to learn about the latest developments in Sencha. This year’s conference covered the massive changes that Sencha has recently made in its current frameworks.

The biggest announcement by far though was the merger of Sencha Touch with EXT JS, thus providing one unified framework for both desktop and mobile platform development.

Below is a summary of some of the highlights from the conference:

• EXT JS 6.0 Announcement: EXT JS 6.0 has merged Sencha touch and EXT JS frameworks. Now with one unified framework of EXT JS 6.0, Sencha developers can build both desktop as well as mobile apps.
• Sencha Plugin for Jetbrain Webstorm IDE is now available for download. Sencha announced the Jetbrain plugin integration with various jetbrain IDEs like webstorm, PHPstorm etc. In all the sessions I attended, the Sencha presenter was using the webstorm IDE instead of the Sencha Architect IDE. And there was no mention of a Sencha Architect IDE release in the near future for EXTJS 6 either, which put a question mark on the future of this IDE, in my opinion.
• Fashion – Sencha also introduced Fashion, which is a runtime JavaScript implementation of SASS. This was a welcome announcement for graphic designers especially, since it means they don’t need to compile SASS anymore and waste time just to see CSS/SASS changes, since with Fashion, graphic designers can see these changes at runtime without having to compile the code each time.
• Sencha Inspector – this was a new debugging tool that was also announced at SenchaCon. It’s similar to the “browser inspector” that you use to debug JavaScript applications but goes a step further by providing debugging in Sencha class view models, thus reducing development time.
• Sencha Space: Another major announcement was Sencha Space, which is a complete solution for building, testing and deploying apps securely without the deployment hassles that you usually encounter when deploying apps to different platforms. A good example of its use was the SenchaCon event’s app, that all the attendees including myself were using during the conference for sessions info, etc. This was in fact deployed using Sencha Space and we were all able to receive app updates directly due to Sencha Space.

Ask the Sencha Expert Panel:

At the conference, the Sencha management had also provided a Helpdesk with a Sencha expert panel known as “Ask the Sencha Expert”. It was open to all attendees you but had to take prior appointment from the management in order to meet them.

Overall it was a great experience. I think SechaCon is a must attend event for all Sencha developers, if you’re looking to enhance your expertise in this technology.

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