Andrew's ramblings

ColdFusion - do I use extJS or jQuery

Tags: extJS, Coldfusion, jQuery

There is a lot of support on both sides to this argument, and one that really at the end of the day comes down to user preference. One of the myths that does surround extJS is that it has a huge footprint and is bloated, this is not true and in fact ExtJS Core is not that much bigger than jQuery.

The decision to use either is really down to personal preference and the support that each of these products do offer, as well as what type of application you are looking at developing.

if you are looking at just doing simple DOM manipulation then both have their strengths, and are of around the same footprint in terms of size. Personally I think ExtJS also offers a lot more out of the box and which can attribute to its slighter higher file size difference.

So what is best for me in terms of development.

Again this depends on personal choice, and as previously mentioned if you are looking at doing DOM manipulation then both are very good at this. But if you are looking at creating a Rich UI then ExtJS is no doubt the clear winner here, and as of ColdFusion 9 one can download any new updates an be guaranteed that they are licensed to use it. jQuery has some very basic UI in its package, and there are a good number of 3rd party or open source offerings out there as well for other features you may need in jQuery as far as the UI goes.

However the one question you are going to have to seriously ask yourself, if I go with one or the other what support am I going to get from the framework?

In reality the support of the core will be the same across the board, for either of the 2 products. But the one major difference is that jQuery has the majority of its UI features as 3rd party open source projects, this means that it will be up to that author or other people to modify this and provide the fix or update features required. And it will boil down to the timely manner in which you eventually get a fix/update, or you even try to get under the hood and modify the code yourself. With ExtJS the license covers the fact that you post the problem to the forums, and the developers can and will give you a solution hotfix or whatever is needed in a very good timely manner.

I think one has to decide whether the time in jQuery and the 3rd party plugins versus ExtJS paid support as part of the license, and development time to do what you need on either is going to be a huge factor.

Over a period of time I am going to write up some more blog posts that conveys the two language syntax side by side, so you can get a feel on how similar the core of the 2 applications actually is.