Sencha Touch - Overview

What is Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch is a popular framework of Sencha which is for creating user interface for mobile application.
It helps developer to create an mobile app using simple HTML, CSS, JS which supports many mobile devides such as android, IOS, BlackBerry, Windows.
It is based on MVC architecture. The latest version of Sencha Touch is 2.4.

History

After releasing sencha's other product ExtJs which was for web application it was a need to develope a framework which works on mobile devices too.
First version of sencha touch was 0.9 beta version which supported Android and IOS devices.
Later this the first main release of sencha touch version 1.0 was in november 2010 which was the first stable version and supported Blackberry device also.
The latest release of sencha touch is version 2.4 released in June 2015.Which supports many more devices such as windows, Tizen along with Android, IOS, BlackBerry OS 10, Google Chrome for Android and mobile Safari etc.

Features

These are the highlighted features of Sencha Touch:

1. Customizable and more than 50 build in UI widgets with collection of rich UI such as lists, carousels, forms, menus, and toolbars, built specifically for mobile platforms.
2. Code compatibility of new versions with the older one.
3. A flexible layout manager helps to organize the display of data and content across multiple mobile devices with different OS.
4. The framework includes a robust data package that can consume data from any backend data source.
5. It provides adaptive Layouts, animations, and smooth scrolling for a better mobile web application experience for user.
6. Out-of-the-box, native-looking themes for every major platform enable you to make web and hybrid applications match the look and feel of your target platforms.

Benefits

Sencha Touch is the leading standard for business-grade web application development. It provides the tools necessary to build robust applications for most of the mobile devices so it provides a single plateform for developing application.

1. It provides responsive touch feature so user can easily navigate while using mobile app.
2. It has compatibility with all the latest versions of IOS, Android and Blackberry, Windows.
3. It provides fastest possible speed desirable for any mobile application.
4. It provides cost effective solution as it has cross plateform compatibility.
5. It is based on the native APIs and basic web development languages such as HTML, CSS, JS which makes it easy for a developer to understand Sencha Touch.

Limitations

Sencha touch API doesn't have the following capabilty:

1. The app does not have access to camera the of device.
2. It does not have access to the contacts and accelerometer too.
3. It does not provide the push notification facility, for this we have to use websockets or long polling.
4. According to general public license policy it is free for open source applications but paid for commercial applications.
5. It is not good for hardcore graphics and animations apps such as for gaming apps.

Tools

Sencha SDK

This is sencha development kit which is used to create skeleton of the project. We use command "sencha -sdk path/to/touch generate app appName" to create app with the name given in the command.
When the app is created you can see the following files in the app:

1. app - This folder contains model, view, controller and store files for the app.
2. app.js - This is the main JS file for your application from this file the sencha code flow starts
3. app.json - This is the configuration file for the app, all the configuration details presents here.
4. index.html - This is the main html file where we include the app.js and other sencha related files.
5. package.json - This file has all the dependency and other information related to app.
6. resources - This folder includes all the CSS files and images required for the application.

Sencha Cmd

Sencha CMD is a command line tool which provides the features of Sencha Touch code minification, scaffolding, build generation more useful for production purpose.
We use command "Sencha app build package" in command prompt to build the application for this we need to go to the app directory in command prompt and type the above command.Once the build is successful you can see the minified version of the application which is basically used for production purpose.
This can be downlodead from https://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/cmd-download/

Sencha Inspector

Sencha Inspector is a debugging tool which helps to debug any issue in sencha code while development.

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