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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T21:57:25+00:00

Folks, I am starting off to learn ExtJS. I had a look through Sencha’s

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Folks,

I am starting off to learn ExtJS. I had a look through Sencha’s website. I went through some of the questions also already asked here.

But had some doubts,

  1. What is the difference between ExtJS designer and Aptana ? Do we require both ?
  2. How to start building your own 1st application in ExtJS ? Any tutorials for the total beginners.
  3. Will I need to write JavaScript code manually or use a ExtJS designer to do that for me ?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ll disagree a bit with the already-accepted answer.

    1. They are both optional. I use neither.

    OK, not too helpful. Aptana is a general-purpose IDE. It is based on Eclipse, but unlike vanilla Eclipse (which is Java-oriented) Aptana has lots of additions and plugins for doing JavaScript, PHP and other “web-centric” development. I actually use Aptana myself, even for Ext development, because it works for me. IDE discussions tend to get religious — everyone has their own requirements and peeves, YMMV. Aptana does actually support framework-specific autocomplete, including for Ext JS (though I think they are still on an older version). Note that you can accomplish the same things as Aptana (generally-spekaing) using WebStorm, Komodo, NetBeans, TextMate or any old text editor — just depends on what IDE-specific features you find helpful or not.

    Ext Designer (now Sencha Architect) on the other hand is NOT a general-purpose IDE — it is strictly intended as an Ext UI design tool. However, it does go beyond simply “placing widgets” on the page. You can easily drag-drop things into place and also preview how they will render, hook up data stores to databound widgets (again via simple drag/drop interactions), it includes context-specific config and property setting (which makes it much easier to know what options are available without having to refer to the API docs constantly), etc. Architect then generates classes, in best-practice code format, that you can drop into your app and then extend as needed with your own business logic. The output of Architect could basically become the input project for Aptana (or whatever) where you would build your application code (although many people stick exclusively to Architect).

    Regarding tutorials, the docs site of Sencha.com was revamped recently and includes many tutorials updated for the most current versions of Ext. Of course the official examples are also a good place to start. The best book on Ext development is probably Jay Garcia’s Ext JS in Action, though unfortunately it has not yet been updated for Ext 4 (he’s currently working on that). It’s a great overview of the concepts and best practices for Ext in general though, and a lot of what’s in that book will still apply today.

    Finally, while Architect will definitely get you started with good UI code, it will not wire your app together or write any business logic for you. For that, you’ll have to use the existing tutorials and examples to help guide you to write your own code.

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