I originally started this blog post in February, but did not have enough time to finish it. Meanwhile things changed and much of my post went outdated.

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>

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 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.

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 .

New aplha release of great Ext Javascript Library is ready for download. If you do not know about this great JavaScript library, you can take a look here. I am playing with this library from it’s first public versions and I can definitely recommend it.

It includes AJAX extension itself including AJAX Control Toolkit and source code release. I have to say that I took a break for a couple of weeks in ASP.NET AJAX area, but now I am working on my personal project – AJAX enabled e-shop for photos and pictures. I think it will be a good test for this final release . I am really excited to see what I can do with it .