Book Image

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

By : Mark Lancaster
Book Image

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

By: Mark Lancaster

Overview of this book

Modern web-based applications are moving rapidly away from simple HTML pages, with users expecting desktop styled rich internet applications. Oracle Application Express includes multiple built-in interfaces especially designed for adding JavaScript libraries and components. Ext JS is a polished, high performance set of customizable UI widgets with a well designed and extensible Component model. Combining Ext JS components with the well engineered server side processing provided by Oracle APEX is a recipe for success. Written by Oracle ACE, Mark Lancaster, this book is a complete practical guide to building robust desktop-styled web applications using Oracle Application Express and the powerful Ext JS JavaScript library This book starts off by setting up a productive environment for Oracle APEX and Ext JS, preparing you to get ready to code, and then gradually introducing you to the Ext JS API. You then create a theme based on Ext JS into APEX from scratch, starting with integrating the Ext JS library into the page template, then covering all the template types. You further enrich your interface by integrating Ext JS form components and Ext JS layout elements. You are shown how to integrate components including tab panels, toolbars and menus. Existing components are also enhanced, transforming select lists into auto-completing combo boxes and text-areas auto-sizing as you type.Using exciting new Plug-ins feature, you will learn how to develop custom APEX components that can be used declaritively. This book extends native APEX functionality by integrating Ext JS widgets and components with integrated server-side JavaScript generation, AJAX processing and validation.The book then covers integrating Plug-ins with APEX provided Dynamic Actions JavaScript. You proceed further to build advanced interactive components using AJAX enabled trees and grids. Then you will see how to use the iFrames component along with page templates to build a multi-page interface and also deal with JavaScript communication between iFrames. Finally, you will integrate Ext JS with jQuery using the Ext jQuery adaptor. This book also covers examples of jQuery functionality interacting with Ext JS. By the end of this book you will also learn to improve the performance of your JavaScripts.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter we have spent time familiarizing ourselves with some of the underlying concepts and functionality Ext provides for manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM).

By using simple standalone testing pages, we have done isolated testing without worrying about interaction with APEX, or trying to build end solutions. Using the Firebug Console, HTML, and DOM tabs, we have executed Ext code snippets and inspected the results both in the browser and within Firebug.

We have investigated the Ext.Element component, exploring how it allows us to easily manipulate and navigate the DOM. We have used CSS3 selectors provided by Ext.DomQuery to retrieve elements of interest, and then modified them by using the Ext.Element API to add and remove classes, attach event handlers, and add or remove elements around them.

We have explored more advanced event techniques such as delegation and one-off events, as well as modern JavaScript programming concepts such as object notation and the need...