JackBe partners with Ext JS to offer Presto DE
October 29, 2008 by Abraham Elias
We are excited to be a part of JackBe’s announcement this week of both the Mashup Developer Community (MDC) and the free Presto Enterprise Mashup Developer Edition (DE). JackBe, the leading provider of enterprise mashup software, partnered with Ext JS to support the creation of sophisticated mashup widgets. By JackBe leveraging Ext JS, our community now has the added benefit of being “mashup-ready” developers.
Getting Started
Much of JackBe’s mashup UI technology is based on Ext JS. As an Ext JS developer, you’ll be right at home developing custom Mashlets using all your Ext JS knowledge. JackBe has some great examples of Ext-based mashlets, including a Competitive Intelligence mashlet, and their very popular ‘People Finder’ mashlet. My personal favorite was the sample mashlet application “Mashboard”.
Putting It Together
Presto includes a Mashlet Wizard that creates templated mashlets in a few clicks. But the real power is when you get your hands dirty and write plain-ole Ext JS code. The learning curve for an Ext JS developer is a few hours.
Every call to a mashlet will query the latest data from all of the data sources in the mashup, apply all of the sorts, merge, join/filter/extract operations you have specified, and render your prebuilt Ext interface with that new data. Many mashlets are also syndicatable and are accessed as simply as a script tag which can run in any browser. They can also be published as a JSR-168 portlet, or a widget in Netvibes or iGoogle, and even run on the iPhone. Mashlets are delivered from the Presto Mashup Server and hides all the security and governance required of most enterprise apps, particularly the ones that connect to many underlying data sources.
Interesting Stats
Gartner recently rated Enterprise Mashups as a Top IT Technology for the second straight year. In addition, Forrester estimates that mashups will be a $700 million market in 5 years. Therefore, Ext JS developers have the skills today to participate in a rapidly growing market.
Summary
We are thrilled JackBe selected Ext JS as their UI technology to, as they put it, ‘give Mashups a face’ . Deepak Alur, the VP of JackBe engineering said, “Partnering with Ext JS and using Ext JS javascript library as a foundation for our Mashlet technology was a no-brainer. It takes only a few minutes to see how powerful and enterprise-ready Ext JS is. It’s a perfect fit for us and our mashup developer community.”
I’ve been perusing JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community and also been getting personal demos from the JackBe. I am impressed with the speed and power you get from Presto Mashups and Mashlets. I recommend you join the MDC and download Presto DE. JackBe has started a Mash for Cash contest to find the best mashup developers. Our community has the leg up mashing with Presto and Ext JS. So, get to Mashing!
Posted on October 29th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Very nice except the Competitive Market demo doesn’t work in Firefox 3.0 and the People Finder never returns from a search.
Posted on October 29th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Mm. Some fo those demos are less than impressive! The Competitive Market one scrolls a GridPanel inside a Container instead of allowing the GridPanel to scroll its content. The GridPanel is autoHeight:true which *explicitly disables* scrolling of a GridPanel’s content.
The Pubmed search, when you expand the top Panel to show the search terms, a scrollbar appears which occludes part of the two Panels. The “collapse” tool is JUUST visible enough for you to click on it and restore the display.
Doesn’t really show Ext in its best light!
Posted on October 29th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
In addition to the tools and samples that were discussed in this blog entry, the Presto Mashup Developer Edition provides a tight integration with Ext JS at the API level.
The Presto.extjs.ServiceStore is an implementation of Ext.data.Store to wrap the Services and Mashups that are registered with Presto. It makes it very easy to invoke and consume simple services such as RSS/REST as well as complex Enterprise services that are typically exposed as WSDL or a DB.
Here is the link to the blog entry - http://www.jackbe.com/enterprise-mashup/blog/presto-and-extjs
Posted on October 29th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Hi Nigel, I agree the UIs could use your special touch. With the “Mash for Cash” contest, I can easily see you taking one of the top prizes. In fact, I’m confident that our community can have a Ext trifecta!
Posted on October 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Yup no response from FF3 here either. Was this tested before released to the community?
Posted on October 30th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Hi All,
Thanks for highlighting the Firefox 3.0 issues. Our developers are looking into it and will have a fix in place soon.
Posted on January 24th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
thanks.
Posted on June 27th, 2009 at 5:55 am
saolun diyim.