Enterprise Web Development

Chapter 12. Sencha Touch

The Sencha Touch framework is a little brother of Ext JS. They both have the same creator, Sencha, and they both are built on the same set of core classes. But Sencha Touch is created for developing mobile web applications, whereas Ext JS is for desktop web applications.

Enterprise IT managers need to be aware of another important difference: Ext JS offers free licenses only for open source projects, but Sencha Touch licenses are free unless you decide to purchase this framework bundled with developer tools.

This chapter is structured similarly to Chapter 11, which describes jQuery Mobile—minimum theory followed by the code. A fundamental difference, though, is that whereas Chapter 11 has almost no JavaScript, this chapter has almost no HTML.

We’ll try to minimize repeating the information you can find in Sencha Touch Learning Center and extensive product documentation, which has multiple well-written Guides on various topics. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the features of Sencha Touch followed by a code review of yet another version of the Save The Child application. In this chapter, we are going to use Sencha Touch 2.3.1, which is the latest version at the time of this writing. It supports iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

Note

If you haven’t read Chapter 4 on Ext JS, please do it now. Both of these frameworks are built on the same foundation, and we assume that you are familiar with such concepts as MVC architecture and xtype, SASS, ...