Book Image

Learning Ext JS

By : Colin Ramsay, Shea Frederick, Steve 'Cutter' Blades
Book Image

Learning Ext JS

By: Colin Ramsay, Shea Frederick, Steve 'Cutter' Blades

Overview of this book

<p>As more and more of our work is done through a web browser, and more businesses build web rather than desktop applications, users want web applications that look and feel like desktop applications. Ext JS is a JavaScript library that makes it (relatively) easy to create desktop-style user interfaces in a web application, including multiple windows, toolbars, drop-down menus, dialog boxes, and much more. Both Commercial and Open Source licenses are available for Ext JS.<br /><br />Ext JS has the unique advantage of being the only client-side UI library that also works as an application development library. Learning Ext JS will help you create rich, dynamic, and AJAX-enabled web applications that look good and perform beyond the expectations of your users.<br /><br />From the building blocks of the application layout, to complex dynamic Grids and Forms, this book will guide you through the basics of using Ext JS, giving you the knowledge required to create rich user experiences beyond typical web interfaces. It will also provide you with the tools you need to use AJAX, by consuming server-side data directly into the many interfaces of the Ext JS component library.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Interacting the fool

While the previous examples are interesting in the abstract sense—they give us an idea of how the Ext JS drag-and-drop system works—they aren't going to be setting your newest development alight. For that, we need to consider how multiple drag targets and drop targets can interact, and how we can set up more complicated systems for dragging around items of data.

Zones of control

We've seen how to hook up a single draggable item, but often, you'll want to have a number of elements ready to be moved around the screen. The solution here is to use Ext.dd.DragZone and Ext.dd.DropZone to enable the movement of multiple nodes. We're going to replicate a simple to-do list application, which will allow the user to move items from one list to another. However, this functionality will be seriously limited, allowing us to focus only on the relevant topics. First, we need to set up some basic HTML:

<h1>Today</h1>
<ul id="today...