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

Summary

The Ext JS grid functionality is one of the most advanced portions of the framework. With the backing of the Ext.data package, the grid can pull information from a remote server in an integrated manner—this support is built into the grid class. Thanks to the array of configuration options available, we can present this data easily in a variety of forms, and set it up for manipulation by our users.

In this chapter, we've seen how the data support provided by the grid offers an approach to data manipulating that will be familiar to many developers. The amend-and commit approach allows fine-grained control over the data that is sent to the server when used with a validation policy, along with the ability to reject changes. As well as amending the starting data, we've seen how the grid provides functionality to add and remove rows of data.

We've also shown how standard Ext JS form fields such as the ComboBox can be integrated to provide a user interface on top of...