The business value of open source software (OSS) goes beyond a company’s bottom line. Aside from accelerating development speed and simplifying software licensing for IT teams, OSS also delivers a host of benefits such as flexibility, freedom, and accountability. But while adopting the open source model has enabled the creation of new and innovative product solutions that brought tremendous benefits to organizations, using OSS also has its drawbacks and limitations.
Platform incompatibility, security threats, and non-availability of support for new technology and hardware are just some of the challenges that software development teams face when using open source software. In order to overcome these challenges and avoid complexities, software development teams should leverage a solution that helps accelerate OSS adoption and encourage secure development practices.
Sencha, a trusted provider of cross-platform application developer productivity tools, delivers the right tool that provides a balance between an OSS approach and a level of control and security. With Sencha’s cross-platform tools, software development teams can efficiently and easily design, develop, and maintain data-intensive enterprise web and mobile applications.
SourceForge recently spoke with Robert Warmack, a director at Sencha, to discuss the benefits of using open source software and how IT teams can address open source vulnerabilities. Warmack also shared how Sencha EXT JS helps empower developers by hastening their web application development efforts.
Q: Can you please give our readers a brief overview of your company (ie. year founded, headquarters, size, etc)? What industries can benefit most from your open source solution?
Robert Warmack, director at Sencha
A: Founded in 2007 and based in Redwood California, Sencha was acquired by Idera, Inc. in 2017 to become part of the company’s developer tools business unit. More than 10,000 customers, including 60% of the Fortune 100, rely on Sencha’s web application development tools to power thousands of data-intensive web applications around the world.
Sencha’s products enable enterprises to rapidly design, develop, and test web applications across any modern device. Our enterprise-class Java and JavaScript frameworks leverage progressive modern standards to deliver data-rich applications for desktops, smartphones, and tablets. They provide developers with over 100 professionally-built and supported JavaScript components, including top-notch grids, that work across multiple OSS frameworks, such as React and Angular. Our testing solutions seamlessly support these tools to significantly accelerate multi-platform development lifecycles.
Q: Open source software (OSS) has established itself as a cornerstone of modern business computing. In your opinion, how has OSS changed the Information Technology landscape?
A: OSS has been instrumental for innovation and creativity in the web technology space. It helped grow a whole new generation of passionate developers. However, it also challenged some of the fundamental principles for technology companies. It has not created the same economic incentives to build sustainable solutions compared to commercial enterprises.
In recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of more compatibility between OSS and commercial tools for development. A number of “freemium” models have been very successful, which we believe brings long-term viability for OSS for commercial use.
Q: What are some challenges that businesses are facing when using OSS alone? And how is Sencha helping developers and IT teams manage open source vulnerabilities?
A: Free and open source JavaScript frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue, continue to grow in popularity. They are light and provide a lot of flexibility, encouraging widespread adoption by developers. However, open source also has its limitations. While it is easy to start and source a team, unless you have a substantial budget and experience, most companies fail to manage their product life-cycles successfully.
Today, most Enterprise Web Application projects consist of hybrid technologies that use open source frameworks, but leverage paid and professionally maintained components. In addition to being a complete, easy to use JavaScript framework, Sencha Ext JS also provides the most comprehensive set of components that are fully supported and can be easily integrated with open source frameworks like React and Angular.
Q: OSS vulnerabilities have a profound impact on an organization as a whole. What measures should IT teams take to effectively reduce open source risk?
A: Historically, developers have had a lot of autonomy to choose components, especially within organizations that are committed to using open source software. This has exposed many organizations to risk from disparate components that do not meet security requirements or have professional support paths.
By adopting components that are professionally supported, the risk is significantly reduced. Further, if a customer chooses to use an enterprise-friendly framework, such as Ext JS, the level of control increases and vulnerabilities are fewer. Of course, there are specialized tools that help increase JavaScript security even more. Mature IT teams should commit to a few approved component vendors and adopt appropriate security tooling that gets reassessed periodically.
Q: How can your open source software help empower developers? In what ways can Sencha Ext JS help IT teams accelerate their web application development efforts?
A: OSS is an important mechanism to democratize software development and increase the pace of innovation. Multiple developers can rapidly collaborate and evolve ideas without the need to think about business models, marketing, and other considerations that are typically involved in commercial enterprises. The fact that the tools are free accelerates adoption and feedback that make the technology even better.
When an enterprise adopts OSS, it gains access to a vibrant community of developers that are highly engaged and often younger, which can be also economical. The risk is that the enterprise adopts a greater level of responsibility to “maintain” the solutions that get developed, as OSS communities have no formal obligations to do so. If the technology continues to be “cool” then things continue to go well, but if the “cool” factor goes away, adoption can rapidly decline and the level of maintenance increases exponentially.
Most big trends in OSS are also backed by big technology players who support these initiatives for their own reasons, increasing the risk of OSS. Ext JS provides a balance between an OSS approach and a level of control. Sencha is designed around best practices and security-conscious architectures which help encourage secure development practices.
Q: What are some popular use cases for Sencha Ext JS? What makes your open source applications development software unique from other solutions?
A: Ext JS is a complete JavaScript framework with the largest UI component library that enables developers to quickly build and easily maintain data-intensive, enterprise web and mobile applications. The tools are used by many of the best-known applications in the world, including CRMs, ERPs, and other highly complex web applications. Ext JS is also very useful and relevant for single-purpose enterprise web applications, such as an employee portal. The main differentiators are the high-quality visual outputs and the incredible productivity that organizations can achieve. Some of our benchmarks indicate that teams using Sencha can achieve 5x faster development at a fraction of the cost.
Our approach to OSS integration relies a little more heavily on interoperability between Ext JS and other JavaScript frameworks, versus pure native components. While this is becoming more of a general trend with many popular single-purpose components operating like a framework within OSS frameworks, none have the experience and scale that Sencha provides.
Q: Can you tell us how Sencha Ext JS works and what this solution encompasses?
A: Ext JS is a complete JavaScript framework whose components are easily extendable to React, Angular, and other popular OSS frameworks. The Ext JS component library includes over 100 pre-integrated and tested high-performance UI components. Our most popular components include:
- Grid, Pivot Grid, and Exporter for sophisticated data analytics.
- Charting and D3 adapters.
- Calendars, forms, menus, and tabs.
- Extensions to 3rd party component libraries, such as Gantt charting.
Our open source packaging is highly productive and effectively handles any size and source of remote data across any device type. It connects to any back-end data source and seamlessly manages the flow of data to components, making consuming data in trees, lists and grids simple. Sorting, filtering, and grouping of data is all automatic – without manual intervention by the developer. It includes an extensible validation system with numerous built-in validators.
Q: Looking ahead, what emerging trends do you think will impact organizations using open source in the coming year? What are your plans to address these trends?
A: We believe that OSS technologies will continue to be popular, especially as they find more seamless ways to converge with commercial technologies (even Microsoft has embraced OSS). We are excited to see how the two worlds become less antagonistic and more complementary. Many amazing OSS solutions are becoming successful businesses, and commercial enterprises are accepting the notion that open source technologies can accelerate innovation.
At Sencha, we’ve incorporated OSS-friendly tooling and continue to open source technology to deliver better outcomes for our customers and the developer community.
About Sencha
Sencha, a division of Idera, Inc., is a leading provider of cross-platform application developer productivity tools. Headquartered in California, the company aims to empower developers by accelerating software innovation and solving application developer productivity problems. Sencha’s products enable IT organizations to rapidly design, develop, and test data-intensive and cross-platform web applications for tablets, smartphones, and desktops.