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

Getting a feature-rich tree interface such as Ext.tree.TreePanel up and running in eleven lines of code is pretty impressive, and we've shown that it is possible. Over and above that, this chapter has demonstrated that the TreePanel's strength is not simply in its ease of use, but in the way we can use its wealth of configuration options to deliver application-specific functionality.

The use of asynchronous loading is an important feature of the TreePanel, because it provides a way of consuming large amounts of dynamic data in a scalable fashion. It's also handled transparently by Ext.tree, which means that the implementation is as beneficial for the developer as it is for the end user.

Despite all of their power, the Ext.tree classes still manage to feel pretty lightweight in use. It's easy to tame that power by using the configuration options, the methods, and the events that the TreePanel and TreeNode provide, but it's not just about these classes. TreeSorter...