A couple of cups of coffee and a late night fueled by the hatred of the TinyMCE editor prompted me to write a set of Plugins extending the functionality of the ExtJS HtmlEditor. Home & Stone asked me to integrate the TinyMCE editor into their application, so of course I said yes, knowing that I had done this before and that it generally worked out just fine. Well, three or four days later (its al Read More...

Alright, now that I have your attention with that snappy title, I can talk about a little unknown feature of ExtJS 3.0 that will definitely make your life easier and shorten your code by a few lines - "ref" (everything should come with a "web 2.0" logo) This new config that was introduced in ExtJS 3.0 provides us with a way to create a reference to a component right in the config. It's so simpl Read More...

We have all been there, mucking around with code, thinking to ourselves "why does this component not have an X method?" or "where did all my scoped vars run off to?" spending valuable time debugging your code just to eventually find out that you have gone out of scope and didn't know it. The unfortunate thing is that its so incredibly easy to loose track of your scope, and not often are the result Read More...

With a shiny new "Web 2.0" logo, Packt announced their Packt Author Award 2009. This is the first year they are giving this award away, and as luck would have it, my book - Learning ExtJS - is eligible for it. Packt will take the top five ranking books (based on votes) and send them to a review panel to be poked and prodded. The review panel will then pick what they determine to be the best book b Read More...

So I set aside a few hours over the past week to update my GMapPanel code with some new features and examples that I think would help everyone. Two new examples, and an update to one to add a form used for entering lat/lng or address to center the map on. Added locale support for the error messages that the map presents to the user - map locale support is still handled on Google's end of things. Read More...

Chris Scott recently published a blog post outlining the current books available for ExtJS. He makes some excellent points about the approaches used in each of these books (or at least the two currently available). "Learning Ext JS takes a top-down approach to teaching Ext JS ... this approach will certainly immerse the reader quickly into a number of common techniques used througout the framewor Read More...

This tutorial builds on the demo code included with the Learning ExtJS book, specifically the 7_json_grid.php example from chapter 5 - which can also be downloaded here. The code for this tutorial can be downloaded here, and a live example is available here. Were going to implement a fairly simplistic grid drag and drop. This implementation will allow you to drag a row of data to re-order it wit Read More...

I know many of you in the Baltimore/DC area have been excited about the prospect of getting together and being able to exchange knowledge. So I am announcing the Balto/DC JavaScript user group's first meeting which will happen on February 3rd. We will continue to meet on the first Tuesday of each month. While the group is not specific to ExtJS, its likely that many of our topics will include ExtJS Read More...

In an obvious moment of insanity, the company Coolite has decided to provide free copies of the Learning ExtJS book with license purchases. Their sales are sure to skyrocket due to this book being included. But in all seriousness, I really appreciate that a company producing such a robust ExtJS integration toolkit would include my book. If your a ASP.NET developer, and are interested in creating Read More...

One of the first ExtJS specific meetups I know of happened in San Francisco last week. The host Peter Kellner tells me it was a great success and everyone involved enjoyed it. My publisher Packt agreed to donate a book to the event to be raffled off. Here is a quote from Peter's blog about the event: "At our first meetup, we talked about EXT some and also raffled off a copy of the new ExtJS book Read More...