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

Downloading Ext JS


The Ext JS SDK (software development toolkit) can be downloaded as a single zipped file from the Sencha website at http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/download. This book is based on version 3.3.1, the latest release at the time of writing. As the Ext framework is now quite mature, you should be safe to use later releases of version 3 with this book, should they be available.

Ext JS is released under both open source and commercial licenses to suit both implementations and provides support to developers through community support forums, as well as subscription-based support and maintenance.

The download of the Ext JS SDK is nearly 15MB, and once extracted, is roughly 105MB. The reason for the large size becomes apparent once we start examining the extracted files.

The screenshot shows the contents of the top directory within the Ext JS SDK zip file. It comprises everything you need to work with Ext JS, including documentation, resources, and examples.

Let's briefly go through the directories shown in the screenshot.

File/folder

Description

adapter

Contains the ext-base.js file used to provide browser-independent base-level DOM and AJAX functions for use by the main Ext JS library. It also contains adapter files that allow you to work with other JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, Dojo, and YUI.

docs

Documentation for the library.

examples

Individual component and combination examples. This is a veritable treasure trove of information and working solutions to be integrated into Oracle APEX.

pkgs

Assembled subsets of the JavaScript library, designed to assist building customized versions of Ext JS.

resources

Images, CSS files, and Flash objects used by Ext JS.

src

JavaScript source code for Ext JS.

test

Test cases used by Sencha for automated testing harness.

ext.jsb2

Control file used to merge JavaScript files from src into pkgs files, and also ext-all.js and ext-all-debug.js. Merged files have the comments stripped and code minified. Merged files with the -debug suffix are a non-compressed version, preferred during development so that debugging is easier.

ext-all.js

Full Ext JS library, excluding the adapter, compressed and minified.

The uncompressed version without comments, ext-all-debug.js, is useful for debugging during development. The uncompressed with comments version is ext-all-debug-w-comments.js.

*other

Other files not described: index.html, gpl-3.0.txt, INCLUDE_ORDER.txt, license.txt, and so on.

As you can see from the relative sizes of the folders, the Ext JS SDK has placed an emphasis on documentation and examples. This greatly assists in learning to use the library and is a real credit to the Ext JS developers.

The ext-all.js file and the adapter and resources folders are the only files you need to deploy to your production web server. While saying this, my preference is to deploy the entire SDK. That way all the documentation and examples are on hand.

Note

Many of the examples need to be run from a web server and cannot be run directly from your computer. This is also true of the documentation. So if you're wondering why you just see a spinning image when you open the documentation file locally, now you know.