Preface

I started my career in the world of Sencha back in 2006 when the precursor to what’s known as ExtJS today (Sencha’s desktop JavaScript framework) was still an experiment. Soon after my introduction, I became addicted to the design patterns that were promoted by the quickly evolving framework. But more importantly, I fell in love with the thriving community of developers looking to contribute.

I was inspired by many of the active members and decided to become a contributing member myself, spending tens of hours per week answering people’s questions, writing blog posts, and eventually publishing instructional screencasts.

I can remember the feeling of excitement when I learned of the development of Sencha Touch back in 2009. Back then, HTML5 was something that people didn’t talk about much, and it was only a draft specification. In 2012, Sencha Touch 1.0 arrived and was the first HTML5 mobile framework on the market. A lot of the technology driving Sencha Touch is considered revolutionary in the industry. For example, the Sencha Touch scroller is one of the most robust and smoothest available for single-page applications for mobile devices.

To be honest, I’d never done mobile development before then. I didn’t own a smartphone and I didn’t know much about WebKit. I’m happy to say that Sencha Touch changed all that for me!