Thursday, May 7th, 2009
Ext JS in Action Excerpts and Discount; Ext JS 3.0 RC update
Category: Sencha
Two pieces of news related to Ext JS hit at the same time. Firstly, Ext JS in Action has gone into early access mode, and Jesus Garcia has been kind enough to give the Ajaxian community some exclusive chapters for free:
This article is taken from the book Ext JS in Action. As part of a primer chapter on the core fundamental concepts of the framework, this segment goes through each phase of the component life cycle, making sure that your custom widgets remain on track.
As part of a chapter on building and customizing input forms, this segment teaches you how to submit and load data into your newly created forms.
Manning has also given us the discount code “ajaxian35” that gives you 35% off of any version of this book. So, if you like what you see in the excerpts, get it cheap!
Aaron Conran has announced the latest release candidate for Ext JS 3.0:
There are many enhancements in Ext JS 3.0, too many to include in a single post. Some of the major features in Ext JS 3.0 are the splitting of Ext Core and Ext JS, Charting for visualizations, additional User Interface improvements, CRUD-like support with Ext.data.DataWriter, Remoting using Ext.Direct, CSS enhancements to make theming easier, and Accessibility improvements – Section 508 and ARIA support. We also fixed several browser issues for the latest Chrome and Safari releases and added IE8 support.
I always love looking at how nice the widgets look, like this:
Read the post for a detailed view on the changes.
Are there any plans to include Ext in a TaskSpeed comparo? Ext Core 3.0 looks good. I’d like to see how well it stacks up against other libraries performance-wise.
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/04/13/yui-270-on-taskspeed/
Actually Tim Sporcic (http://www.sporcic.org/) did this test with SlickSpeed and it turns out Ext Core 3.0 is faster than Sizzle on some browsers. Here is the article
http://www.sporcic.org/2009/04/slick-speed/
Snorefest. I care more about Bindows than I do Ext.
Does anyone know how easy migration from 2.2 will be?
@ilazarte – why post something so utterly unconstructive?
@gsenior: Backwards compatibility is supposed to be good. The 3.0 RC 1.1 release says this about upgrading:
“User upgrading to Ext JS 3.0, will be happy to hear there are little to no breaking changes. We took great care in only creating breaking changes where absolutely necessary. You may encounter issues upgrading if you were previously manipulating private properties of an Ext.menu.Menu or an Ext.Toolbar or if you had custom styling of an Ext.Button.”
Read the full blog post, there are heaps of awesome new and improved components:
http://extjs.com/blog/2009/05/04/ext-js-30-rc11-released/
Anecdotally I can say that upgrading is fairly painless. I wrote a fairly complex tree extension that works unchanged in the new version.
http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60759
Admittedly I don’t think there were any improvements to the tree in 3, so ymmv if you use other components. So far I think the bigger issue is bugs in the rc version.
Nice to see that ExtJS keep expanding and upgrading what i see as the best component JS library.