Ext

The Ext GWT Grid component, which was introduced in 1.1, plays an important role in most applications. Because of this, it is important for Grid to perform as fast as possible, especially when rendering large amounts of data. For the upcoming 1.1.1 release we took a fine grained look at the code and were able to lower rendering times significantly.

As Enterprise applications begin moving to the web instead of the desktop many developers may forget about providing key bindings for their applications. Most web applications use the keyboard only for text entry and do not associate particular key combinations with user actions. By providing this type of key handling, particularly for applications which require a lot of data entry, we can improve the end-user experience.

We are pleased to announce the release of Ext GWT 1.1. This release is packed full of new features and components. Ext GWT 1.1 is a recommended upgrade for all Ext GWT 1.0 users.

Come join Jack Slocum and I for two developer focused sessions, “Hands On Ext” and “Advanced CSS and Theming of Ext JS” at The Ajax Experience at the end of this month. Feel free to follow along with your laptop or watch as we build an application and demonstrate how to create a custom theme in each hour long session. The Ajax Experience is a three day conference with many interesting sessions on Ajax, Web 2.0 technologies and JavaScript frameworks targeted at developers. This year’s conference will be held in Boston, MA from September 29th to October 1st.

When Google Chrome was released last week, I was interested in seeing how the Application mode feature worked. I revived an old project to interface with the Google Contacts Data API and built a small application to manage your google contacts which you can ‘install’. The example extends the Ext.data.DataProxy to allow you to populate a store with your contact information to bind to any store driven components such as Grid, EditorGrid, ComboBox and DataView.