A change to one of our suppliers
The purpose of today’s post is to respond to a question we were asked recently on Twitter about the underlying Javascript framework that powers FOEX, namely Sencha Ext JS. In late August a press release was published detailing the acquisition of Sencha by a company called IDERA.
Whilst there has been a lot of speculation in the community about the future of Ext JS, some negatively (which is to be expected). However it is still too early to predict what the future might hold for Ext JS, or what IDERA’s intentions are. Restructuring, staff changes, cost cutting – are all expected consequences from any merger/acquisition.
The main reassuring statement that we can point out, regarding the future of Ext JS can be found in this article written by Atanas Popov, the GM for Embarcadero Technologies (acquired by IDERA in 2015), who appears to be the person who will lead the Ext JS team moving forward:
Ext JS will continue as a distinct product line, but supported by greater resources. We believe there is an opportunity to reignite the Ext JS community and get more new developers to appreciate its power and productivity.
Another really positive sign was a press release published earlier in the year, which detailed a 1.125 Billion dollar recapitalization of IDERA. Meaning that there is significant level of funding for future company growth.
As for the framework itself, it’s 10 years old this year, mature and the most comprehensive component based javascript framework out there. It’s last release was on the 27th of September 2017. This is only 8 days ago and a month after the acquisition took place.
So how does this affect FOEX?
Not much will change really, business will continue as usual.
Truth of the matter is, this acquisition will have very little impact on the way FOEX operates as a company or our future plans for improving our software and add-ons. We have a standing OEM agreement with Sencha which continues to run exactly the same as before the acquisition.
IDERA itself is focused on database and software development which aligns exactly with what we do, so there could be many additional benefits which we can take advantage of in the future. We look forward to a close collaboration with IDERA and the new team that will handle Ext JS moving forward.
So for now we’re busy working on the next version of the FOEX Plugin Framework, which will bring some great new features that will continue to simplify the building of data-heavy large-scale back office applications. It’s coming real soon….