Is it possible to use ExtJS components in AngularJS?

Question

I'm really enjoying learning to use AngularJS. Now I'm looking for components I can use with it. I've been looking at Angular-UI components but I'd like to know if it's possible to use the nice, supercharged components in ExtJS. Does anyone have experience with this? Any hints or tips or Angular directive libraries?

Answer 1

The company I work for is making a similar move. We currently rely heavily on an older version (3.x) of ExtJS, and the effort to upgrade to the current (5.0) version is at least equal to the effort required to move to angular.

To answer the question (to the best of my limited knowledge):

They can exist together in the same JS application.

Can you use UI elements of ExtJs with Angular?

You can put angular in control of markup via HTML templates in Ext.

Is this a wise idea?

Probably not.

Why would I consider doing this?

1. I need absolute control over the markup and don't care about possible page load issues

2. I need to serialize or de-serialize in some special way that Ext doesn't innately provide

3. I need to do something special like pub/sub (still totally possible with Ext)

In our case, it is a proof of concept for a few modals. If I am biased, I am biased in the direction of ExtJs (which is a huge statement given my background). The more exposure I have to ExtJS, the more I personally like it. I've used several frameworks in the past like Ember, Backbone, KnockoutJs and AngularJs and they are excellent tools that are reaching a level of maturity that makes them excellent choices. That said, they don't follow the same development model/pattern that ExtJs does, and I don't think a direct compare is fair to either side.

It would be almost like comparing Ext to Node (silly, I know).

If your project requires some special functionality that you don't believe is possible in Ext, you are probably like me and have limited experience with it. If you have a lot of experience with Ext, and want to try what we are trying, I say go for it. The single downfall of Ext is the size of the built package that is delivered. Another small framework isn't going to help that, but it also isn't going to cause more pain.

In the end, for me, I just love JS and expanding my knowledge of how things work now and in the future.

For the post above asking about the lack of traction for Ext: the answer is simple... it's not free, and thus not an option for many of us who aren't writing commercial software that fits well with the license.

Answer 2

In our AngularJS app at work, we have integrated a 3rd party ExtJS app with it, not for its UI components though. We open certain popups of that app based on user input and when the user commits data in the popup, we respond to ExtJs events to refresh our app. AngularJS is flexible enough to integrate with any other Javascript code/libraries as long as the library has public events to respond to. I would recommend going through the Directive and scope documentation on how to effectively create directives and respond to scope events.

Personally I do not feel ExtJS and AngularJS would be needed together, unless you are forced to use it like me. There is http://angular-ui.github.io/ that brings in a lot to the table. Again any given JQuery plugin can be integrated using directives, filters etc in AngularJS. So you may want to investigate into that before trying to bother with ExtJS.