Yesterday JQuery announced that they will be including the previously unreleased jQuery effects suite "Enchant" into jQuery UI.

Additionally jQuery UI can now be found at UI.jQuery.com with a really great UI not surprisingly.

I had to right click on the demo page to be sure I wasn't looking at a Flash scroller. Although quite a few of the demo pages were still showing "Under Construction" place holders (I thought that went out of style in 98?), the demos that are available are really good.

You will also notice the design has a particularly Liferay feel to it, it is after all sponsored by them.

I got a chance to play around a little bit this evening with ColdEXT. If you don't know what it is, it is a really good custom tag library that for a fair portion of the EXTJS library that is pretty easy to use.

It looks like Justin Carter spent a fair amount of time working on this custom tag library. He has a few examples packed into the zip file as well as on his blog but as of yet is lacking any extensive how-to guides (but most of you shouldn't have too much time figuring it out if you have had any exposure at all to EXT).

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Jack and the team over at Ext JS released an update to their popular Ajax framework. This update was release to provide better support for the newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

The sample application built for AIR using the EXT framework was also subsequently updated and is now available (source included) for download.

You can read more about the amazing Simple Task application on the EXT JS blog.

I took the application for a test drive and I have to say it's pretty damn cool. I especially like ability to drag-n-drop tasks from Outlook to Simple Task.

I read an interesting article on the jQuery Blog today about how the lead on the jQuery UI team, Paul Bakaus, has been hired by Liferay inc. to "bring Jquery UI to the next level"

Additionally Paul mentions that Liferay will be standardizing all their products to use jQuery. This tight integration of jQuery by Liferay is sure to catapult jQuery's popularity even more.

This is quite an interesting partnership and will undoubtedly have an impact on the company I work for as well as we have been flip/flopping between ExtJs and jQuery but since we plan on doing a lot more work with Liferay I imagine there will be more a lean towards jQuery.

A reader asked me yesterday about filtering a CFGrid using a CFSelect. I am quite happy to say that it is dead easy to do using the new CF8 tags. You can also bind your CFGrid to more than one control you just need to handle it with your cffunction.

Take the following grid for example. The grid is bound to a tree control as well as another control. The tree control sends the directory to the geFiles function to return a list of files.

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Mike posted on CF-Talk today asking what was wrong with his bind expression on his cfgrid.

At first I thought that he wasn't building the bind expression correctly as you need to work from the webroot down to where the CFC is located.

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In this post we will begin to dissect the javascript code used to create the EXT Ajax Grid.

In Part 1 I simply introduced you to the Javascript in a complete example without really explaining any of the code.

I will do my best to break it down in to manageable chunks. Starting with setting up the Anonymous function and then going onto setting up of the data store.

Here is the complete Javascript block once again for reference:

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In the previous Ext Tree and Coldfusion Example post we set up an EXT treeview bound to a Coldfusion component.

In this example we will be building upon that example to add a dynamic context menu to our tree. The context menu will be populated by calling a function in a Coldfusion component.

Step 1

The first thing we need to do is include the below snippet of code in the head section of our page, but after the ext-all.js.

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The EXT tree is, in my opinion, a much better implementation of a dynamic ajax tree than what the yahoo utility toolkit starts out with, and subsequently what Adobe decided to use for the CFTREE tag. Once again I am really amazed at the quality work that Jack and his crew have done.

The tree itself is relatively simple to set up as either a static tree or dynamic tree.

In the example code I will be showing I have set up the tree to have a lazy loader. This means that I will only be showing the root (and in this case the first set of children) of the tree and each time a node is clicked a call will be made to populate that nodes children.

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I have been experimenting with the new coldfusion UI tags since the pre-release program some time ago and the more I use them the more I realize that some of them just aren't really all that useful, and the others only marginally so.

I think I will probably get some use out of the CFLAYOUT and CFWINDOW tags but to be quite honest if I need a grid or a tree I will most likely skip over the CF implementations and go with the EXTJS tree and grid. They are a heck of a lot more configurable, I have access to all the functionality offered whereas with the CF versions I am limited to the functionality and init config options that they thought would be most useful.

I could, perhaps, finagle my way to getting what I need using the ColdFusion.Grid.getGridObject and ColdFusion.Tree.getTreeObject, but with the grid being Ext and the tree being a Yahoo widget it isn't the easiest thing to do, especially if I know that if I used the grid as it was first of all I would have what I wanted immediately without the hassle.

Don't get me wrong the Adobe team did a good job of providing us developers with easier methods of integrating Ajax into our applications but in the end I will probably end up writing custom tags that will give me the flexibility that I need.

I hope others find these new UI tags more useful than the old ones, which I can honestly say I never used.