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

Tricks and advanced layouts

Some of the more complex web applications will need to do things that are not as simple as setting a few configuration values, for example nesting one layout within another layout, or adding icons to your tabs. But with Ext JS these kinds of things are made easy.

Nested layouts

When we nest one layout within another layouts region, we will occupy that entire region's body so it cannot be used any more. Instead, the nested layout regions are used for content.

For example, if we wanted the center region split into two horizontal regions, we could add a nested layout with center and North regions. This is typical of an application where you have a data panel (Center) to list email messages and a reader panel (South) to preview the entire email when it's selected in the list in the North panel.

Nested layouts

A couple of things are needed for a nested layout—the layout type must be set, and in this case, we are turning off the border so we don't get a doubled...