Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook (Paperback)

~ Jorge Ramon (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Clear step-by-step recipes for building impressive rich internet applications using the Ext JS JavaScript library

• Master the Ext JS widgets and learn to create custom components to suit your needs
• Build striking native and custom layouts, forms, grids, listviews, treeviews, charts, tab panels, menus, toolbars and much more for your real-world user interfaces
• Packed with easy-to-follow examples to exercise all of the features of the Ext JS library
• Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

In Detail

Using Ext JS you can easily build desktop-style interfaces in your web applications. Over 400,000 developers are working smarter with Ext JS and yet most of them fail to exercise all of the features that this powerful JavaScript library has to offer.

Get to grips with all of the features that you would expect with this quick and easy-to-follow Ext JS Cookbook. This book provides clear instructions for getting the most out of Ext JS with and offers many exercises to build impressive rich internet applications. This cookbook shows techniques and "patterns" for building particular interface styles and features in Ext JS. Pick what you want and move ahead.

It teaches you how to use all of the Ext JS widgets and components smartly, through practical examples and exercises. Native and custom layouts, forms, grids, listviews, treeviews, charts, tab panels, menus, toolbars, and many more components are covered in a multitude of examples.The book also looks at best practices on data storage, application architecture, code organization, presenting recipes for improving them--our cookbook provides expert information for people working with Ext JS.

What you will learn from this book

• Work with different browsers, platforms, and the DOM, as well as determine and understand the different ExtJS data types
• Create your own custom Ext JS data types as you extend their functionality
• Build great-looking and friendly forms by using client and server-side field validation, form loading, submission, field customization, and layout techniques
• Explore the different layouts provided by the Ext JS library as well as create your own, and understand their common uses
• Display, edit, and group tabular data generated by the server using Grid Panels
• Explore the advantages and the efficiency tradeoffs of widgets such as Combo boxes
• Use the drag and drop features of the grid component, data editing with the new RowEditor Class, and the new lightweight ListView component
• Explore multiple ways of displaying master-details relationships
• Group components or information under the same container to build hierarchical views of information by using TabPanel components
• Use patterns to build a solid and flexible application architecture and implement additional design patterns such as auto-saving form elements, component state management, and code modules to build robust and flexible applications with Ext JS
• Build your own custom components on top of the Ext framework and enhance the custom components created by the Ext JS users' community

Approach

The Ext JS Cookbook contains step-by-step instructions for Ext JS users to build desktop-style interfaces in their own web applications. The book is designed so that you can refer to it chapter by chapter, or you can look at the list of recipes and read them in no particular order.

Who this book is written for

The Ext JS Cookbook is for Ext JS users who want a book of useful techniques, with explanations, that they can refer to and adapt to their purposes. Developers who are already familiar with Ext JS will find practical guidance and numerous examples covering most of the library's features and components that can be used as a solid foundation to build upon when creating rich internet applications.

About the Author

Jorge Ramon Jorge Ramon is the Vice President of Development for Taladro Systems LLC, where he has led the design and development of a number of software products for the law industry-including QwikTime(tm) and LawDrill(tm). Jorge has over 16 years of experience as a software developer and has also worked creating web applications, search engines, and automatic-control software. He actively contributes to the software development community through his MiamiCoder.com.

Jorge Ramon

Jorge Ramon is the Vice President of Development for Taladro Systems LLC, where he has led the design and development of a number of software products for the law industry-including QwikTime(tm) and LawDrill(tm).

Jorge has over 16 years of experience as a software developer and has also worked creating web applications, search engines, and automatic-control software. He actively contributes to the software development community through his MiamiCoder.com.

Jorge Ramon

Jorge Ramon is the Vice President of Development for Taladro Systems LLC, where he has led the design and development of a number of software products for the law industry-including QwikTime(tm) and LawDrill(tm).

Jorge has over 16 years of experience as a software developer and has also worked creating web applications, search engines, and automatic-control software. He actively contributes to the software development community through his MiamiCoder.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847198708
• ISBN-13: 978-1847198709
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #247,583 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal Book!, November 23, 2009

By	Art (Fox Lake, IL, USA) - See all my reviews

ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook is definitely geared towards JavaScript developers who have some basic understanding of and experience with ExtJS 3.0. If you're brand-new to ExtJS, you may want to wait a few weeks until you've spent some time playing with the various components and layouts that ExtJS offers.

As an experienced ExtJS developer, I can say with absolute certainty that I learned some new tricks while reading this book. I wrote a full review on my blog ([...]) but here's the short version.:

Ramon's approach to explaining the examples is virtually flawless, and the box-style headers make it easy to follow. I haven't seen too many coding books use this technique, so kudos to whoever thought of it!

If I had to pick a single reason to buy ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook, it would definitely be Chapter 9 (Well-Charted Territory).

Why?

For starters, the ExtJS website samples don't do a great job explaining how to use many of the available charts. The online documentation also lacks direction. Jorge is the first person I've seen who thoroughly explains how to use each type of chart, and his examples are both unique and helpful. Kudos!

I've read a lot of programming textbooks, and none are nearly as helpful or interesting as ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook. It is a quick read for containing 356 pages, and Jorge Ramon does a fantastic job offering tips and tricks for ExtJS developers.

Regardless of your experience level, the ExtJS 3.0 Cookbook will absolutely teach you something new!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars cookbook review, December 8, 2009

By	Matthew Reid "http://themattreid.com" (The Internet) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've been using ExtJS for the last year and have experienced the transition from version 2.0 to 3.0 and have been rather pleased with the results it has delivered for numerous web projects I've coded. After trying many other JS kits and frameworks including Jquery, Mootools, and several others I have generally settled on ExtJS to solve the layout and user interface parts of my applications because of its ease of use and flexible nature for expansion. The framework is an extension of the Yahoo javascript framework, otherwise known as YUI, but with many quality extensions. This book comes as a welcome guide to the general tasks that the framework will solve as well as some of the more unique and in-depth items that it can provide. Quite simply it's a book with over a hundred examples of all the best features of the ExtJS framework. The examples are well explained with detailed write-ups that are fun to read. The examples also have immediately usable code for dropping into place or modifying for your own needs. If you're interested in learning more about this amazing framework or are already acquainted and need a quick guide to expand your abilities, then this will be a good reference to own. Before I get going you can see the book here.

The book starts out with an overview of the way that ExtJS handles DOM and data types, which is all very basic stuff but required understanding as well. It's a good start to understanding the base elements if you are a bit rusty. It's also a good chapter to see how ExtJS handles them since it might not be what you are used to if coming from another framework. After enough pages to answer most typical questions of that topic the book dives into the UI building aspects of the framework. This is where things get really good as I've always enjoyed how the framework builds UI for the web. You get examples for containers and positioning, accordion functionality, card and tab based windowing, column and table layouts, and the windowing functions for full browser UI building. I've used many of these features all in one layout and the results are a effective and efficient manner of data distribution and information organization for content driven sites. The book even covers dynamic building of UI elements, which comes in handy for a user interface that grows and changes with the needs of the user.

After you build your UI you need methods to get content into the application and ways that the user can interact with the app. The book addresses these needs as well. Plenty of examples abound for all of the required manners that users will be using forms, date fields, combo boxes, remote data loading via JSON and XML, as well as covering grid panels and data tables. Of course it must be mentioned that there are numerous examples that discuss the AJAX features of ExtJS since this is one of it's major strengths and successes. If there's a way to use remote data calls via XML or JSON, it is covered in this book. We also get a nice run down of trees and tab data which is inevitably useful for many purposes. If you are interested in progress bars and customized progress circles the book covers those with over 20 pages of examples. Just before the topics are finished off Jorge covers the functions for building rich charts and graphs. Details involve static data display, remote data display, as well as auto-refresh of data for realtime charting. Patterns, class extensions, plugins, and 'keeping state' are the last topics of the book. They offer quality methods for customizing ExtJS with your own JS code and keeping the user's data consistent between sessions.

Overall this is one of the best books I've read about ExtJS. It's as if the author took all of the items that I had to research over the last year of using the framework and put the solutions all into a nicely readable form with quality code examples that are explained in a useful manner. If you are looking for a book that touches upon the most common and some of the more esoteric options of the ExtJS framework but don't feel like scouring the online forums and hundreds of pages of documentation then this is the book for you. If you haven't already built your own code for the features that the chapters discuss then the examples given will save you time and get your projects up and running fast and efficiently.

5.0 out of 5 stars Phenomenal, January 30, 2010

By	Adam J. Rackis "AR" (Melbourne FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

Clear, concise, practical. This book is loaded with useful recipes, which are well explained and easily modified to suit your own project. Honestly one of the best tech books I've bought in a long time.