ExtJS vs. jQueryUI

I recently had the experience of doing the same thing (a search combo box) with jquery and extjs. I found extj开发者_运维知识库s to be buggy and overly complex. On the contrary, I found jquery to work very well and be very simple. I am wondering what are other people's experiences of using extjs. Does extjs complexity actually buy you something?

They are not comparable imho.

jQuery UI is just a combination of a couple of widgets which can be used together but are not really integrated or anything. Quite extensible, quite fast, but not a complete widget toolkit.

ExtJS is a full-blown widget toolkit Web App framework that is comparable to most GUI toolkits in terms of features. yes it's useful, but it's also very complex and very large/slow. So imho it depends on what you need. For a normal frontend I would never use ExtJS since it's way too large and slow. But for an Admin panel or something large where it actually adds a lot of usability, yes please.

Just try and create something like this with jQuery UI: http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/totals.html

Also, with ExtJS you can even design your interfaces with a drag and drop interface these days: http://www.sencha.com/products/designer/download.php

Size comparison:

jQuery:

• jquery-1.4.2.min.js: 70.5KiB
• jquery-ui-1.8.5.min.js: 199.5KiB
• Total: 270KiB

Ext:

• ext-all.js: 697.7KiB
• ext-base.js is 26.5KiB
• Total: 724.2KiB