Ext-JS

I've been maintaining a few intranet sites at work which has been good to get up to speed with some of the web stuff.
A good portion of this is legacy C#/ASP.NET code with only a hint of a pattern here and there. But as the only maintainer, it has been a necessary evil to get into.

Some other project have been a lot more current, using BackboneJS, JQuery etc. Not sure I'm a fan of Backbone - there seems a lot of boiler plate code to get it working.
I find I'm a lot happier using KnockoutJS as I'm more familiar with MVVM patterns and binding paradigms - shame no one has used it on any of the projects I'm on.

But, this week I'm going to start inheriting another web application written using Ext.JS 4. All I can say is..holy crap! This is not just some nice set of components you can fit in where you want. This is a complete framework that is seems to be either all or nothing. And you build the UI by describing it through a proprietary API, and not HTML. Awesome.

Working through an example was painful, as it didn't work as described and it ended up taking me a day to get it working. It relies on magic strings everywhere which just rings alarm bells straight away and doesn't work on mobile. But, working in health means we need to have sites and software that can run on old machines and IE8. Gulp.

The one thing I've noticed moving more into web dev as there are simply too many ways to do something and quite often the optimal choice is not obvious. On the other hand, writing a Windows application, service or even web service is much easier as there are only a few ways to do things optimally. And you don't get bogged down in stuff I don't care about. But maybe that's because I've developed my own libraries/re-usable code/patterns over the years and I don't need to think about it...