PREFACExvi
After about a year and a half of work, I can reflect on the late nights and sacrificed
weekends spent trying to figure out ways to explain complex concepts so that any
developer could understand them. During that time, I did my best to interface with
the
MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) readers and Ext JS community, processing
feedback to make this book what it is.
I hope this book is helpful to you. Please feel free to visit us at the Manning Author
Online forum and provide your thoughts, comments, and suggestions.
About this book
Ext (pronounced Eee-ecks-tee) JS 3.0 is an extremely powerful cross-browser UI frame-
work for building rich and robust applications, originally developed by Jack Slocum in
2006. Since then, Ext JS has endured explosive growth because it addresses the need
for web developers to have a true UI framework, complete with a component and
event model. That makes it still unique in the growing competitive space of Web 2.0
libraries.
Written by a member of the Ext
JS community, this book walks you through the
framework in great detail, from the perspective of a peer-to-peer conversation. It uses
examples both small and large to demonstrate how to use Ext JS effectively. It also
includes many custom illustrations to help accelerate learning of the material.
Ext JS is an extremely large framework and continues to grow with every release.
Because of the size of the framework, this book focuses on the core concepts that all
developers need to know to be effective when developing Ext JS apps. Such concepts
include the
Component
lifecycle, each of the layouts, creating extensions and plug-ins,
and so much more.
This book does not cover parts of the framework or modules such as state and
cookie management, Direct, and Designer. Cookie and state management were
passed up in favor of covering other key principle topics, such as developing applica-
tions. Ext Direct is a way to remotely call the client side from the server side and also
allows for seamless communication between the client and server side, but isn’t
included because it requires specific knowledge of server-side languages and thus is
too broad a concept for this publication. The Ext Designer application rapidly creates
rich interfaces for Ext
JS, but isn’t covered because it wasn’t available during the devel-
opment of this book.
Who should read this book?
This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn Ext JS and use it well. Instead of
just being a container for recipes, this book tries to give the reader a deep understand-
ing of how Ext JS works from the inside out and how to apply it in their application
development efforts. The examples are written so that novice and expert JavaScript
developers alike find them useful.
Some skills are required to be able to understand the material in this book, how-
ever. You need to be fairly experienced with JavaScript,
HTML, and CSS, though you