If you like Ext JS, the new 2.2 version brings out some nice features for you. No question Ext is a great library and worth to play with, despite the recent disputes around the license change from LGPL to GPL.
My only frustration with Ext was only a few days ago, when i was about to make modifications in an open source project that had an earlier Ext 2.0 bundled, but not fully! So where can i get the full Ext 2.0 package to add some adapter files that were missing?

  1. Ext website? Forget it. On the download page you can only download the latest, on the “build your own” page you can have 1.1.1 and 2.1. No matter if you try to trick the forms, you will not get any 2.0 version :)

  2. Second idea: SVN! Hehe, forget it. Ext JS does NOT have open SVN access (that is free).

  3. Hmm, if you read the threads around the license dispute, you will eventually come accross a project that forked (basically just copied and published) the latest 2.0.2 LGPL version of Ext. It is called openEXT, a few days ago it was still available on sourceforge, by now it seems to have vanished. Anyway it was questioned if this fork was legal or not, so the question is still: where can we get a legal copy of 2.0?

  4. My frustration grows. What next?

  5. The idea pops out: lets look up some open source projects that use Ext, and have access to past releases. I am sure there are many, but the one i had immediate success with was SugarCRM. Download version 5.0.x, and there you go!

NOTE: I have no intention of ruining the business of ExtJS here, my only intention was to fix something that used an older version of Ext. Putting aside licensing questions, i strongly believe that closing down the access to older versions is rarely a good idea. It contradicts the philosophy of open source and the Internet itself.

UPDATE!

As Anonymous pointed out in the comments, the old releases are indeed available on the ExtJS website!
To my defense to reach it you have to go: home - support / community / learning center - API Reference and Demos(?) / Archived downloads of previous releases. Not the most logical you would say, and no link from the downloads page. Also if you ask Google who links to this page, you will get zero result. It doesnt appear in their robots.txt as disallowed, yet somehow it is not being indexed.

UPDATE2: OpenEXT seems to be back by now.

UPDATE3: There is a gcode project called extjs-public, which provides svn access to publicly released Ext JS versions. It seems to hold releases beggining of 2.0.2. Enjoy!

This is an archive post. It represents a point of view in the past. Facts might have changed, events might be interpreted differently as of today. Links might be broken.