It is great to see that Ext JS team is working hard on features that reflects people needs. New release candidate looks very promising and especially Charting, ButtonGroup (Microsoft Office 2008 Ribbon  style;)), Buffered GridView and Debug console are really sweet.

Yes, yes I like the way Douglas Crockford talks about AJAX and JavaScript. Especially his last talk about AJAX Performance. I think that it is essential for every web developer to see/read this presentation.

Well as long term Ext JS fan and user I of course faced with consuming external data resources like for example Google Data API or Google AJAX Search API. The last one mentioned has some really great output and layout capabilities, but I did not want them. I really need only some kind of JSON or XML interface. Google has one – ScriptTag. So after reading this post about creating custom Ext.data.JsonReader and Ext.data.ScriptTagProxy.

/** Ext Proxy for Google Ajax Search **/
Ext.namespace('GoogleAjaxSearch');
 
GoogleAjaxSearch.Proxy = Ext.extend(Ext.data.ScriptTagProxy, {
   url: 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web',
   apiKey: null,
   cx: null,
   callbackParam: 'callback',
 
   constructor: function(config) {
      GoogleAjaxSearch.Proxy.superclass.constructor.call(this, config);
      this.on('beforeload', this.onBeforeLoad, this);
   },
 
   onBeforeLoad: function(o, params) {
      Ext.apply(params, {
         v: 	'1.0',
         rsz: 	'large',
         cx: 	this.cx,
         key: 	this.apiKey,
      }
      );
 
      return true;
   }
});
 
 <a href="http://www.wiso.cz/2008/10/30/custom-ext-js-jsonreader-for-google-ajax-search-api/#more-443" class="more-link"><img src="http://www.wiso.cz/wp-content/themes/wiso/images/more.gif" border="0" style="border:0" alt=" Read More " /></a>

My colleague show me service that I was always missing – an online task manager with great UI and possibility of integration using some kind of API. And that is not all. It has also cool name RememberTheMilk.com. I really like it, because of Mozilla Thunderbird extension is already there.

I just came across this interesting utility for all JavaScript developers.

From its website:

Taffy DB is a free and open source JavaScript library that acts as thin data layer inside Web 2.0 and AJAX applications.

What makes it cool:

• Under 10K!
• Simple, JavaScript Centric Syntax
• Fast
• Easy to include in any web application
• Compatible with major AJAX libraries: YUI, JQuery, Dojo, Prototype, EXT, etc
• CRUD Interface (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
• Sorting
• Looping
• Advanced Queries

Well, I want to announce a new viewer for Erlang documentation. Yes I know that it is nothing revolutionary and innovative, but I am Erlang user and Erlang documentation in its current version is not very user friendly (It is not only my opinion ). Because I am working on an experimental Erlang web framework based on Ext JS – ErlExtUI, I realized why not do some user sample application for this purpose and shot two flies with one bullet.   Please note that it is work in progress, so if you find any problem or want some new feature, feel free to contact me. And now finally URL – http://erloid.wiso.cz/samples/documentation/.

Features

• modules browsing/tabs
• module name filter
• Google powered module search

Happy using

Well Ext Javascript library is great. No doubt about it. And because I am still using PHP for some of my projects, I wanted some abstraction over Ext for PHP. There was no such project for PHP at that time. So I decided to start-up with some small prototype (yes I am XP fan ). All worked quite well, and code base started to expand. But one day I realized that I am doing noting than rewriting Ext to PHP… That strange feeling did not came away and I decided to do something with it. Back to the trees…. So after some time spent by thinking about design and generally whole purpose and motivation to writing PHP helper for Ext library… And my conclusion was that I will write some helper framework for handling communication (JSON and XML) and to help generally with all but Javascript itself. Ext syntax is simple and nicely designed so why not use Ext syntax itself… So that was how ExtPHPUI was born…

With ExtPHPUI I am focusing on following features:

• simplicity
• security
• performance
• flexibility

These more server oriented features are not in the scope of Ext JS, so I decided to provide helpers to simplify Ext JS sever side development…

If anyone is interested in PHP development with Ext JS library or even ExtPHPUI and want to share some knowledge and experiences feel free to contact me. I will write some more information about this project later.

Volta is Microsoft’s attempt to create toolkit for creating multi-tier web applications. It should be declarative and ease web developer’s life by adding more abstraction to development. I have to say that I am a bit confused by many MS projects that are web related (like AJAX, Silverlight and now Volta). I am going to take a deeper look into it and hopefully will write some finding here.

As always I am happy to that this great JavaScript library has moved forward. I was playing with alpha and beta versions and there is a lot to play with! If you are not familiar with Ext library I can only recommend it to you.

I have to say that this post makes me little bit happier today. I am using Mozilla browsers since its first public versions, but memory consumption was one of my biggest complains towards it. Especially in a few last months I was close to change my preferred browser . I know that a lot of problems can be caused by 3rd party Addons or dozens of opened tabs, but ….  Anyway I am really looking forward to see some improvements soon .