Best extjs questions in March 2011

Is Ext JS a superset of jQuery?

Asked on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 by Mike M. Lin jquery extjs
7 votes

So jQuery handles DOM manipulation, event handling, and special effects. Ext JS also does that, plus has a lot of built-in UI components.

Here's the question. Is there anything substantial that jQuery has that Ext JS doesn't?

Here's the context. I've been wondering what reason people would have of using both Ext JS and jQuery. Some guesses:

  • They feel more comfortable with jQuery, but need the extra capabilities of Ext JS
  • They have a site already in production with jQuery, need to add Ext JS, and don't want to rewrite what's already there
  • There's something that jQuery has that Ext JS doesn't

Answered by Jaitsu

Basically, ExtJS provides a completely different set of features that jQuery. Like you said, jQuery is designed and optimized for DOM manipulation (selectors, attributes, traversing, effects etc), whereas ExtJS' primary purpose is to provide a rich component library for user interfaces.

If you're working with the DOM and you aren't creating any kind of user interface then stick with jQuery, but if you're creating a rich web app then ExtJS is for you.

Whilst ExtJS provides some basic DOM manipulation in it's Ext.Element class, it is nothing on jQuery and many people use the two together for this reason.