Ext

Many developers are familiar with the rich UI capabilities included within the Ext framework. The core team has worked very hard to provide as much functionality as possible to help build top-notch applications that are not only visually appealing but incredibly powerful. While we’ve tried to cover many common “use cases”, invariably there’s going to be a need for new and exciting features that we haven’t tackled. This is where the Ext community comes in.

Community Contributed Extensions

The Ext community has done an amazing job at creating some fantastic plugins to the framework which in some cases dramatically enhance existing controls and in many cases, add whole new UI capabilities altogether! We’ll be reviewing several extensions which standout both in functionality and quality.

LiveGrid by MindPatterns

A typical “use-case” is one where you have a large result set that needs to be displayed in a grid control. Obviously, returning a large data set (e.g.: 50k rows) and managing that data client-side can be a challenge. Paging schemes and memory management come into play and both can have a dramatic impact on the user experience. Thorsten Suckow-Homberg developed an extension that gracefully handles this scenario. The plugin uses a buffering technique to load a specific number of records and after scrolling past the last buffered row, submits a new XHR call to return the next subset of records. This has the benefit of enhancing the user experience by not forcing the user to wait for a large result set to load and minimizing the browser memory requirements for managing a large result set.

http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17791

Slate Theme by J.C.

While most Ext developers are more than happy to use the included themes, to many, having a unique look is increasingly important and the user community has really shined in this aspect. A great example of this is the “Slate Theme” created by Ext community member J.C.. The theme really stands out for it’s visual appeal as well as the clean work produced by J.C. He’s received tremendous kudos for his work and rightfully so.

http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15989

Continously Growing

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the available plugins for Ext but it does provide a flavor of what our community is doing to enhance the capability of the framework. The number of plugins continues to grow with both the Ext Extensions page and the Examples and Extras discussion group being updated almost on a daily basis. Community-contributed extensions are an integral part of the Ext project and we certainly value the hard work and professionalism demonstrated by many of these contributors. We will continue to spotlight plugins on a regular basis to ensure that our community members are recognized for their efforts.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Community, Ext JS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.