In the case of ExtJS I’ve been working with the 2.2 branch (3.0 was recently released), and it has enabled me (the uncrowned king of ugly user interfaces) to create pretty, responsive and reasonably productive graphical user interfaces. Not only that, it also did the job causing a minimum of frustration on my part. It seems that for 99 out of a 100 things I want to add to a user interface, the guys at ExtJS thought of it before me, and added out of the box support directly into the framework. ExtJS is not limited to user interface design though, as “ext core” has all sorts of sweet helper functionality for writing generic non-extjs-ui javascript code. Topping it all of, ExtJS guarantees compatibility with all modern browsers in use, so I get to ignore the whole browser incompatibility extravaganza. Whoohoo.

Qt is much like ExtJS in the sense that it does most stuff right. It massively reduces the need for manually allocating/releasing objects, while at the same time extending C++ with a class library rivaling that of Java. Qt additionally supports native looking gui applications across Linux, Mac and Windows. It even sports a WebKit wrapper class allowing use of a state of the art HTML/javascript engine. In the context of the project that I’ve been working on, that’s simply a killer feature, not currently supported by any other software platform that I am aware of.
Last but not least, Qt introduces an extremely powerful, versatile, thread safe event mechanism called “signals and slots”. Except for the fact that it is implemented by means of yet another C++ preprocessor, it’s exceptionally nicely done.

All in all, I take most (but not all) of the stuff that I’ve said about frameworks back. Bugger.