Sencha touch 1.1 or 2

Question

I have to evaluate Sencha Touch for building native Ipad html5 based apps. I was wondering which version should I start with v1.1 or v2.0?

I bought this book and created a simple html5 app (with Panels, proxies, MVC, toolbars) and integrated it with Java Spring and freemarker templates. All worked perfectly , the book was excellent and the onine documentation was great. This was with version v1.1.

Then Sencha announced that v2 is out with lot of improvements especially in performance. This made me think whether I should start again with 2.0 or just continue building on my prototype with v1.1 and wait till v2.0 gets more mature and has more documentation.

Answer 1

I have been working with Sencha products since Ext2. Throughout all these years I have been rewriting my code numerous time just to adapt to their freaking changing coding pattern.

From the troublesome Class.superclass.method.call() to the new me.callParent(), till the recent adoption of initialize & removal of initComponent in ST2, I would suggest you to go for the newest release since whatever in the past will not be reuse again. Learn the new coding style, don't waste time on the old structure. It won't help you much, considering our web is changing very fast and ST1 and ST2 is pretty disjoint as well.

While 1.1 is good old solid (much like Ext), v2 is much fun to work with with the auto loader.

I built two native Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) apps on iOS lately and the performance is pretty good so far.

Answer 2

IMHO, Sencha Touch 2 is easier to learn and work with. While it was just released as final, there are so many improvements and enhancements to the framework that even with a few bugs here and there I don't see why you wouldn't want to go this route. The documentation is pretty well baked, sporting lots of examples and guides. I think you'll find that you can accomplish quite more with ST2 than ST1. Cheers!

Answer 3

I would go with Sencha Touch 2 all the way. The API is a vast improvement over 1.1 and you are getting much better performance as well, ease of use and improved MVC structure.

Here is an App I recently built using Sencha Touch 2 and was featured in the Sencha touch app gallery: http://www.sencha.com/apps/flosports/

This app was also packaged to native for both iOS and Android using phonegap 1.4.1 and it worked pretty well.