This week I had pleasure to attend sourcedevcon 2011 at the awesome resort Le meridien Split together with @virdun ,@jakobkruse and @stureandersen . I have been lurking for a couple of years in the ExtJS community since attending the extjs conference in Orlando back in 2009, keeping up to date on things at our local Öresund ExtJS meetup , so it was nice to get in touch with some of the regular faces in the ExtJS community.
Near the Dicoletian’s Palace
sourcedevcon 2011 was in the lovely town of Split, near Dicoletian’s Palace.
Flying into Split I had some doubts on how many ExtJS devs would take their time to fly to split, this being the first community-driven sencha conference in Europe. After arriving I quickly put all my doubts aside – since the venue and conference organization was carefully laid out. Split itself is a very charming city, and we had an easy time arriving (leaving was another problem though). I was impressed by the fact that 200+ attendees had chosen to show up (that figure somewhat resembles the first Orlando conference in the US).
At the venue , the first thing we noticed was the outstanding bar with an overview of the local marina and the ExtJS swedes @FredricBerling , @EmilPenlov (and @bryntum when he was not to busy hanging out in some other bars).
Learning some Sencha touch MVC Code fu.
At some point Johan (@virdun) decided that he wanted to get a Sencha Touch application up and running . So we kind of lost him for a moment there in the bar. I don’t remember if it started before @jamespearce introducing sencha touch – but Johan started hacking furiously on this app for his site http://citypolarna.se somewhat right about that session.
Johan playing with his mobile phone
Being Johan, he just wouldn’t let go, so I had to answer a lot of questions about how sencha touch applications worked.
When I discovered that Johan was not being satisfied by the answer “but hey, I haven’t coded a line of sencha touch yet” we walked through the basic shopping list example for sencha touch and Johan modified it a bit, so it could serve as as base for implementing an event viewer for citypolarna. Combining the info found on http://sencha.com and info from the sessions by @_jdg and @edspencer this was an easy task, so modifying the shopping list example to a working application could be done during the conference. Oh yes, it also helped that we remember to use extraParams instead of baseParams .
A good thing about exploring sencha touch and mobile user interfaces is that it can be done in the bar while drinking Mojitos
Learning to migrate to ExtJS 4
Besides learning more about sencha touch I learned a lot from @bmoskeau‘s session on migrating from to ExtJS 4.
Here I especially noted that using the MVC pattern can be postponed to a last optional step and that during migration to ExtJS 4, the old “new” constructor syntax should be able to work (but that the new Ext.define and Ext.create constructs is the preferred way to go). Brian laid out a migration strategy using the 4 R’s “Rendering , Running, Ready, Refactor” describing the 4 stages the migration should go through.
@bmoskeau talking about migration
ExtJS Scheduler and Calendar
The session by @bmoskeau and bryntum on Ext Calendar and Ext Scheduler was supposed to be a showcase of the two products, but to me the main value of the session was seing how easy it was to integrate such complex ExtJS components. My jaw dropped when I saw Brian demonstrate him using his component updating the data model simultaneously in ExtJS scheduler. This is a testament to two very well designed components .
Wrapup
All in all sourcedevcon 2011 left me with the impression of a very vibrant ExtJS community – I also got the impression of the strong commercial focus Sencha has. Sencha presented Sencha.IO as a product – I look forward to exploring that more indepth in the future. I chose to focus more on learning about Sencha touch and the MVC parts of ExtJS 4 during the conference..
“The Irish guys” has posted some writeups of their experiences at sourcedevcon . Well worth a read:
http://www.joelennon.ie/2011/05/05/source-dev-con-day-1/

@nielsdehl has posted pictures from the conference at flickr here :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nils-dehl/sets/72157626648487744/ (sourcedevcon day1)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nils-dehl/sets/72157626533490549/ (sourcedevcon day2)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nils-dehl/sets/72157626544637927/ (sourcedevcon day3)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nils-dehl/sets/72157626672433598/ (sourcedevcon day4)

