Siraj Sayeed

Few days back I stumbled on Ext JS and I was literally “WOW! JavaScript can be so cool!” Then I started exploring it and I was amazed with the kind of things these guys have done. This is the best JS library I have ever seen. I started with the Grid Component and went through the Screencast by Scott Walter. On the Ext JS site, the video was not complete (or stopped for me at about 80%). So I downloaded it from Scott’s website and went trough the whole tutorial. This is really good. Within few hours I had a working grid. Next hurdle was to get it talking to a cfm page to my SQL database through JSON. He did it with php and did not share the code. Actually the problem was with the JSON format Ext JS data reader does not like the format generated with CF8. Anyway, I had it resolved in a hard way through multiple trial and errors and watching the Firebug Ajax console. But trust me, the time was worth spending and I will blog about that later. Next I tried to build a complete application with Ext JS. In fact, last your I built an AjaxCFC based application but that time none of the “cool” components were available. I got the tab from one place, table with sortable column and fixed header from two different places etc. So I wanted to build everything using one library so that the overall look and feel is the same. And here is the result of my last six weeks of work which has:

Tabs Dynamic form element Ajax Combo box Grid tied to a search Edit grid with custom field and save option Date and Color-picker Asynchronous file upload

I have yet to work on the data loadmask, login screen, another tab, issues with Internet Explorer etc. but I though of writing up whatever I have learnt so far before it is too late….

Click here to see the Demo