Another week is on its way out, so it’s time to look back at some of the cool stuff you folks have been working on in the week that was.

Ext JS is now Sencha

Ext JS, the company behind the Ext JS Javascript libraries and tools, has changed its name to Sencha. To go along with the name change, they’ve also brought two open source projects, jQTouch, and Raphaël, into the fold. It’s worth pointing out that jQTouch & Raphaël will remain MIT licensed, although their project leads have both come on board with Sencha.

Between the name change and last week’s exciting release of the Connect middleware framework for NodeJS, you’d think the Sencha folks wouldn’t have any other big announcements lined up. You’d be wrong though, since they’ve also announced the new Sencha Touch framework for developing native-like apps for iOS & Android devices. Sencha Touch gives you a ton of handy tools to make developing mobile web apps easier. It gives you enhanced support for touch events as well as providing a library of custom gesture events. Additionally, it comes with a lot of common mobile UI widgets as well as icons and graphics.

One note of caution: Sencha says that the main Sencha Touch library weighs in at around 80k, which is pretty hefty for a mobile framework. This might cause you some performance headaches since the iPhone won’t cache any single page component that weighs in over 25k. However, you can work around this by using the offline application cache (i.e., declare the asset in a cache manifest).

All in all, it’s been a very productive week for the newly minted Sencha team, so congratulations to them.

Cohorts

Cohorts is a pretty sweet library for doing multivariate tests on your site. In the context of web design/development, multivariate testing is usually used to determine which design elements generate the most clicks or conversions. So imagine you wanted to test whether a red or a green “Buy it Now” button would get more clicks. Just add the Cohorts code, set up two cohorts (one that will get the green button and one that would get the red). After you run the tests for a while, you’ll get results telling you the number of people who saw each of the different colored buttons, and of those, how many went ahead and clicked. By default, the events it tracks will be reported in your Google Analytics, although you can roll your own reporting solution. That’s pretty slick.

PDF.js

PDF.js is a new library for generating PDFs in Javascript. It provides a handful of methods for adding and formatting text and other document components (e.g. fonts, images). You then use those methods to build a PDF document that can then be output as a data URI (if you’re running the code in a browser), or directly to the filesystem (if you’re running the code in NodeJS).

The browser implementation looks to be fairly buggy, based on the developer’s comments, but it’s still a noteworthy achievement, and the Node version works pretty well.