Installing Ext JS

Before downloading Ext JS and Sencha Cmd, we need to set up our computer to be ready. The following is a list of software needed so that we can create an Ext JS application:

We can check whether we have the correct environment by executing the following commands in a terminal application:

Note that the Ruby version installed is 2.x, but as long as you have a 1.8 or 1.9 compatible version in your classpath, you should be OK.

The last step is a web server. The simplest one that we can use to execute the examples of this book is Apache Xampp. Download and follow the installation instructions at https://www.apachefriends.org.

Now that we have our environment configured, we can download Ext JS. Ext JS has some different license flavors: commercial and open source. For this book, we are going to use the open source one. You can download the open source version at http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/details. Scroll until the end of the page and select OPEN SOURCE GPL LICENSING, as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

We also need to download and install Sencha Cmd from http://www.sencha.com/products/sencha-cmd/download. Sencha Cmd is responsible for creating the application and making, building, and compiling Sass and Compass to generate the application's CSS. After the installation of Sencha Cmd, the sencha command will be available from the terminal application as well.

After downloading the Ext JS SDK, unzip it inside the Apache Xampp htdocs folder. Once we start the Apache server, we will be able to execute the Ext JS examples from our local environment:

While developing with Ext JS, we will consult the documentation a lot. Whenever we mention the name of an Ext JS component in this book, it is recommended that you go to the documentation and take a look at it. The Ext JS documentation is available at http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/5.0/. It contains guides (it is also highly recommended that you spend some time reading the guides before diving into this book since the guides provide basic knowledge about the framework), and links to blog posts and also to the documentation itself. As we will consult it a lot, we recommend installing the documentation locally as well. To do so, go to http://docs.sencha.com/, open the Sencha Guides menu, and select the offline docs link as demonstrated in the following screenshot:

Unzip the docs inside the Xampp htdocs folder as well and access your localhost, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can use any IDE or editor of your preference to develop with Ext JS. There are a few editors that are very popular: Sublime Text, Atom, Eclipse (if you are a Java developer), Netbeans, and Visual Studio (if you are a C# developer), Notepad++, and WebStorm, among others.

If you are looking for the autocompleting feature, you can use the Sencha Eclipse Plugin that is part of Sencha Complete (paid) at http://www.sencha.com/products/complete/) or you can use WebStorm (also paid) at https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/).

There is also Sencha Architect (which also has the autocompleting feature). It is a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor and is a great Sencha tool that can be used with the IDE of your preference (to develop the server-side code of the application).

Feel free to use the editor or IDE you are most comfortable with to develop the source code of this book!