James Lorenzen's Blog: Getting Started with Extjs

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Getting Started with Extjs

I was recently approached by an internal co-worker within Accenture about our teams experience with Extjs. Out of 150,000+ employees in Accenture he was able to find us through Yammer, a free private twitter-like service for companies. Originally I was just going to respond to him via email after our phone conversation, but that would only benefit him. Instead I thought it might be a good idea to share that experience on this blog.

My current team has been using Extjs for about 2 years. I don't consider myself an expert nor do I actually like developing in a language that needs to work in multiple browsers. We started out with version 2.x and late last year converted our projects to version 3, which was no easy task.

I will say Extjs has impressed this Java developer. Their documentation and examples are excellent and feedback on the forums is great. Most of my team didn't have any prior heavy javascript backgrounds and all have been able to come up to speed quickly. Right now I think the biggest drawback is the GPL licensing of version 3. I understand why they did it, but doesn't mean I have to like it.

Extjs Resources

Examples - Extjs comes with a nice library of great examples on all kinds of things you can do with Extjs. All the examples also come with the download. One of the neatest examples is the Advanced Grid Filtering. One of the main reasons we upgraded to version 3 was for this feature.
API Documentation - The javadoc for extjs. This is the most important and most referenced documentation for any extjs developer. Keep in mind this only shows the most recent version. If you want the API documentation for previous versions, you'll need to download that version of Extjs. The download includes the same API documentation. For local installation or offline reference, there is also a very nice Adobe Air app (see download page).
Forums - The forums are very active and we have received a lot of help. We also have purchased the premium support and overall I'd say it was worth it. Especially since we no longer have that goto javascript guru anymore (yeah you know who you are).
Community Plugins - It's not huge but between the examples noted above and the community plugins we have been able to reuse a lot and create some neat stuff pretty fast.
Blogs - I'd recommend subscribing to the official Extjs blog as well as this search related feed from DZone. And, just because I think it is cool, here is Google Reader bundle I created that captures everything I tag with extjs. Finally, here is a search on my blog about articles I have written about Extjs.
Books - According to Amazon there are multiple books out right now about developing with Extjs. I have "Learning Ex JS" by Shea Frederick.

Miscellaneous

Javascript/CSS Consolidator - One of the best moves we made was investing in a javascript/css consolidator. Props go out to Joe Kueser for doing this for us. After a few months of development, our application started to grind to a slow crawl as several (80+) javascript and css files where being downloaded. Using the jawr framework we reduced that to around 20 GET requests which improved performance dramatically. Not only does it combine multiple files into one but it also minifies them (removes comments and spaces, etc) and supports gzipping them. I have been very impressed with jawr. It has exceeded our expectations and I would recommend it to anyone.
Development Environment - No web developer would be complete without Firefox and Firebug. But for those occansional nasty IE issues I haven't found the perfect solution. In the past I have had some luck with jsdt. Currently I am using IE8 in virutalbox in IE7 mode with it's built in Developer Tools. Although not firebug, it's the closest I have come to find. For those really bad IE6 issues I have used the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar which beats scattered alerts in your code and is better than nothing.
Extjs version 2.x or 3.x - There has been a lot of history surrounding the licensing strategy so I won't go into all of that. Just know that version 2.x is LGPL and can be used or embedded into your applications for free. Version 3.x is GPL which means if your project isn't some internal IT app or also GPL you need to purchase developer licenses.
Public Uses - Here are just a few well known sites I have noticed using Extjs: Quicken Online and Dow Jones Industrial Index.
jQuery Integration - In case you want to combine jQuery and Extjs you can by using the extjs-jquery-adapter available in the download. I haven't really used jQuery a lot but from what I have read and heard, it's a great javascript library that supports animation and DOM querying. You can do these things in Extjs, but jQuery looks like it might do it better and cleaner. I think Extjs excels in providing out of the box prebuilt and customizable Widgets/Components like the Grid (Table).

Examples - Extjs comes with a nice library of great examples on all kinds of things you can do with Extjs. All the examples also come with the download. One of the neatest examples is the Advanced Grid Filtering. One of the main reasons we upgraded to version 3 was for this feature.
API Documentation - The javadoc for extjs. This is the most important and most referenced documentation for any extjs developer. Keep in mind this only shows the most recent version. If you want the API documentation for previous versions, you'll need to download that version of Extjs. The download includes the same API documentation. For local installation or offline reference, there is also a very nice Adobe Air app (see download page).
Forums - The forums are very active and we have received a lot of help. We also have purchased the premium support and overall I'd say it was worth it. Especially since we no longer have that goto javascript guru anymore (yeah you know who you are).
Community Plugins - It's not huge but between the examples noted above and the community plugins we have been able to reuse a lot and create some neat stuff pretty fast.
Blogs - I'd recommend subscribing to the official Extjs blog as well as this search related feed from DZone. And, just because I think it is cool, here is Google Reader bundle I created that captures everything I tag with extjs. Finally, here is a search on my blog about articles I have written about Extjs.
Books - According to Amazon there are multiple books out right now about developing with Extjs. I have "Learning Ex JS" by Shea Frederick.

Miscellaneous

Javascript/CSS Consolidator - One of the best moves we made was investing in a javascript/css consolidator. Props go out to Joe Kueser for doing this for us. After a few months of development, our application started to grind to a slow crawl as several (80+) javascript and css files where being downloaded. Using the jawr framework we reduced that to around 20 GET requests which improved performance dramatically. Not only does it combine multiple files into one but it also minifies them (removes comments and spaces, etc) and supports gzipping them. I have been very impressed with jawr. It has exceeded our expectations and I would recommend it to anyone.
Development Environment - No web developer would be complete without Firefox and Firebug. But for those occansional nasty IE issues I haven't found the perfect solution. In the past I have had some luck with jsdt. Currently I am using IE8 in virutalbox in IE7 mode with it's built in Developer Tools. Although not firebug, it's the closest I have come to find. For those really bad IE6 issues I have used the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar which beats scattered alerts in your code and is better than nothing.
Extjs version 2.x or 3.x - There has been a lot of history surrounding the licensing strategy so I won't go into all of that. Just know that version 2.x is LGPL and can be used or embedded into your applications for free. Version 3.x is GPL which means if your project isn't some internal IT app or also GPL you need to purchase developer licenses.
Public Uses - Here are just a few well known sites I have noticed using Extjs: Quicken Online and Dow Jones Industrial Index.
jQuery Integration - In case you want to combine jQuery and Extjs you can by using the extjs-jquery-adapter available in the download. I haven't really used jQuery a lot but from what I have read and heard, it's a great javascript library that supports animation and DOM querying. You can do these things in Extjs, but jQuery looks like it might do it better and cleaner. I think Extjs excels in providing out of the box prebuilt and customizable Widgets/Components like the Grid (Table).