To avoid having to go through all 66 videos, here’s a little guide:

Keynotes and general overview of the company, their products and roadmap. First video is a no-words impression of the conference preparations and may only be skipped if you’re not a Stevie Ray Vaughan fan:

• SenchaCon Opening Moments
• Keynote Address Part 1
• Keynote Address Part 2
• Keynote Address Part 3

Developers wondering if/how you can make well written framework in Javascript, including inheritance, mixins, dependency injection and a full fledged MVC framework check out the following 3 videos. The second video also includes some ‘live coding’, showing how you can quickly create a well structured MVC application:

• The Sencha Class System
• MVC in Depth Part 1
• MVC in Depth Part 2

A good overview of the HTML5 features/roadmap and also how to style your application with CSS3, SASS and Compass. This should be interesting for all frontend developers.

• What’s New in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
• Building Sencha Themes

Native/Hybrid/Mobile apps and how to access native functionality from a (packaged) mobile Sencha Touch application. Very interesting as well:

• Accessing Native APIs from Touch

Some very cool functionality in Sencha.io, a cloud service to provide out of the box cloud based login, data synchronisation and messaging:

• Introducing Sencha.io

A separate product, but might be interesting if you want to supply nice looking interactive charts without needing a browser plugin:

• Sencha Charting & Visualization

A look at the new Designer 2, a WYSIWYG IDE for designing visual applications, also works with Sencha Touch to design screens for mobile apps.

• Introducing Designer 2

Good luck!

http://jrecruitv10.cloudfoundry.com/

As you can see, it is a fairly simple but very functional application, showing the latest permanent/freelance IT jobs in the Netherlands. You can also save it to your home screen and start it like a normal mobile app. Also, although tested on the iPhone, it is cross-platform and should work on all mobile devices (as it depends on the Webkit browser).

Some of the architecture/design decisions:

• It uses Sencha Touch 1.1
• After downloading the application (mainly javascript, CSS and some images), it does an additional request to get all the job information (JSON) such as type, category, type, location and language.
• When viewing a single job, it gets the full job description (JSON) and caches that, so the next time you view the job it does not need an additional request.
• The backend is created with Grails/Groovy and retrieves/parses/stores the jobs and makes them available through an API in JSON format. Deployed in the cloud at CloudFoundry.

The application can always be improved, but I was actually going to combine some of the improvements together with a migration to Sencha Touch 2.0 later on. This has some great features and a lot of performance improvements. Functionality and design can always be improved, but my time is limited

Functionality / design improvements:

• New features such as a Tabbar, Filter, Search, Favorites, Promotions, Referrals, CV uploading, Info screen and more.
• The overall design could be improved as well, for instance using a background image.
• Use the new class system and split functionality into different files and packages.
• Test it properly on different devices.

Performance improvements:

• File size. As a web app, it has the disadvantage that it always needs to download the Sencha Touch framework and CSS files, which are relatively large. Sencha Touch 2.0 can reduce the size of the file by only including the functionality that your application uses from the Sencha Touch framework, so you don’t need to include the full framework for simple applications.
• Caching. Use HTML5 application caching (using a manifest file). If this is enabled, all files are only downloaded once and only the data should need to be retrieved the next time you start the app. This should really make a difference.
• Start up time. Sencha Touch 2.0 will improve this.
• Responsiveness. Although I find the application quite responsive on the iPhone 4, this might not be the case on all devices and Sencha Touch 2.0 promises to improve all that.
• Package as a ‘native’ app. I already done a build using Phonegap to create an iOS application and installed that on my iPhone. That worked fine and you can then also use some of the functionality that Phonegap exposes from your device. For instance, indicate if there is no network connection available when trying to update. Sencha Touch 2.0 actually provides a native packager for iOS or Android so I was going to try that later. Putting it in the app store or markets also has the advantage that people can search/find/install it as they do with other applications. Of course, updating the application when submitted to the app store is a bit more work than doing a ‘grails prod cf-update’…

Hope this gives you an idea of a simple application build in Sencha Touch. The advantage is that you can build a cross-platform mobile application without iOS, Android or any other mobile OS knowledge. You can also utilize your existing web (HTML/Javascript/CSS) skills. It might not be suitable for all mobile applications, but definitely something to consider for some. It will even become more interesting when HTML5 matures, devices become quicker, mobile browsers become better and Sencha Touch is constantly improved.

Any questions, or if you would like to know a bit more, let me know! Send me an email at elmer@nederland-it.nl or just leave your comments below. Or if you’re interested, join the Dutch Sencha Touch User Group on LinkedIn.

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In combinatie met de juiste aanpak en tools is vaak een goed ingerichte webapplicatie om te zetten naar een mobiele applicatie, te gebruiken voor meerdere eindapparaten (iPhone, iPad, Android, Web OS, Windows Phone, Symbian en Blackberry).