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

Managing application state

Core to any application (especially an event-driven application) is maintaining and controlling 'state'. This can encompass many different things, from keeping user preferences on grid sorting, to managing multiple Windows or layout areas on the screen, and even being able to use the Back button in the browser and have it change your application without reloading the wrong page. Luckily, Ext JS provides several Manager objects for handling many of these exact scenarios.

Basic 'state'

The Ext.state.Manager class is automatically checked, and utilized, by every state-aware component within Ext JS. With one simple line of code we can set this manager in place, and with little or no additional work, our application's view state is automatically registered.

To put this in perspective, suppose that we have a rather large application, spanning many different HTML documents. Ext JS plays a part in the application, because we've implemented...