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

Chapter 12. It's All about the Data

Ext JS is an extremely powerful, cross-browser library, providing any developer with a beautiful, consistent set of tools for laying out browser-based applications. But there's a lot more here than just pretty boxes and grids. As the title says, it's all about the data! An application without data is really nothing more than an interactive static page, and our users are going to want to manipulate real information. One of the wonders of web applications is that they've taken computing full circle, back to the days of the client/server application model. Ext JS's AJAXified objects provide us with the means to work with real-time data straight from the server, and in this chapter we'll cover the many different ways you can retrieve from and post data to your Ext JS based applications.