PeterKellner.net

I’ve been learning ExtJS now for a couple months and it’s great to see someone has written a book for it. I just bought it and downloaded the E-Book version of it and from what I can tell it looks great.  I’ll post a more detailed review later, but for now, here is where you can get it.

(Note:  2/11/09:  I love this book.  I still plan on writing a more detailed review, but for now, I thought I’d put a brief comment.  I carry it around with me every where  go (almost everywhere).  It has great examples and great explanations -Peter)

As I’m learning ExtJS I plan on publishing the things I figure out.  For those that don’t know, ExtJS is a very rich JavaScript library that gives you all kinds of capabilities that work cross browsers.  Trees, Grid’s, Panels, Layouts and all kind of stuff.  For an idea of the kinds of things you can do, check out the demos at there site at this URL:  http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/samples.html.

It’s pretty amazing the kinds of things that can be done with just client side JavaScript.  At the core of ExtJS are some very useful JavaScript methods.  In order to take advantage of the more sophisticated features, it’s helpful to know the basics first.  In this article, I plan on going through a simple example that will ultimately product html that looks like the following.

For my current project, I’m focused on delivering the fastest and best user experience possible for our web site.  To deliver this, it is necessary to really focus on delivering client side code.  After doing a bunch of research, the very clear answer to me is to use a Library called ExtJS combined with a very nice integration tool suite for the .net called Coolite. It’s basically a very rich interactive JavaScript library that is extremely customizable.  To that end, I’m taking a week training class from ExtJS.  We’ve had our first day which has focused on CSS and JavaScript basics with an eye towards the patterns used in ExtJS.

Things are really heating up here.  We just did our walk through of Foothill College to insure we have room for everyone and all the food.  (Coffee both mornings, lunches both days, Barbeque Saturday Night and bucket loads of technology sessions).  As usual, I had my camera in tow so we could have some pictures.

Timothy Woods, Foothill College Dean checking on rainy day space for us