What is the difference between Sencha's Ext Designer and Ext.NET?

[mgbloomfield]

Sencha's Ext Designer gives us the ability to create layouts and populate the layouts with Sencha's Ext JS JavaScript Library of controls. Connect the javascript controls to various data stores. You're on your own when coding the middle layer with logic. Fair enough.

What does Ext.NET do? There's not much detail beyond what it says on the first page, "Ext.NET is an open source ASP.NET (WebForm + MVC) component framework integrating the cross-browser Sencha Ext JS JavaScript Library. Includes 100+ high performance controls for Data Grids, Trees, Menus, Forms, Advanced Layouts and AJAX communication."

Code-generator? Application-generator? What-generator?

ASP.NET (WebForm + MVC) component framework that integrates Sencha Ext JS JavaScript Library. Does this mean it creates the plumbing code (MVC) between the front-end and the back-end?

1) I have a Microsoft SQL Server database with Stored Procedures in the database for CRUD operations. I'm not a big fan of dynamic sql queries embedded in web pages or the middle layer.
2) I would like to use Sencha's Ext JS JavaScript Library. Mainly so that I'm using the cross-browser compatible HTML5 controls.
3) I'm willing to use Sencha's Ext Designer to layout the controls, etc. The dropdown that contain a finite list of values can come from XML/JSON files on the web server or the data can come from the SQL Server database by calling the Stored Procedures.
5) The biggest help I need is connecting the JavaScript controls to my SQL Server database.
6) I am a ASP.NET, C# guy with intermediate skills that does not fully understand MVVM, MVC, M-whatever.
7) I have a prototype that due in two weeks. I don't care if the code is MVVM, MVC, M-whatever. I just want the prototype to work.

So, tell me, will Ext.NET help me with the middle layer?

Thanks,
Michael

[plykkegaard]

So, tell me, will Ext.NET help me with the middle layer?

No more than the .NET Framework will :-)

Ext.NET creates sencha javascript serverside everytime a page is requested from the client
You can either use markup or codebehind (or a mix of the two)

You can check the examples for an overview
https://examples2.ext.net/

Search for "codebehind", there's 6 examples the rest is markup

Also there is some elderly documentation here
http://docs.ext.net/

In my own project I am mainly using codebehind and create the pages dynamically based on configuration (columns/datatypes in grid, editable etc)

hth /Peter