I have been playing around a bit more lately with ExtJS 2.0 and at the same time with ColdEXT (since ColdEXT is based on the 2.0 version). There have been some rather dramatic changes since the 1.1 version.

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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 stumbled upon a nice little article over at infoQ about how the ExtJS Ecosystem Continues to Expand. The article targets how new server side tools for ExtJs are sprouting up for ruby-on-rails, Java and of course Coldfusion.

The article also specificaly mentions the efforts by Dan Vega and Justin Carter to tie into the 2.0 version of ExtJs (Coldfusion officially only supports version 1.0).

It's good to see both Ext and Coldfusion getting a bit more exposure.

Happy Coding...

The crew over at ExtJS have been hard at working rolling out the 2.0 version of their fine Javascript Framework and now that they have practically rewritten their entire API they have decided to 'relax' a bit and begin offering professional services and training".

It's great to see them branching out to the professional services as I generally see that as the only way to really make an open source project work in the long term. The training services is also a good idea for getting up to speed quickly I just hope they plan to offer online training (CBT style) as well. On-site training is all well and good but I think providing e-training subscription would be a definite boon to a lot of small development shops.

Keep up the great work!

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.

Today marks the official release of EXT JS v2.0. There have been some major improvements as well as additions to this release. A few of the impressive additions/changes include:

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For those of you who like the new Ajax tags of Colfusion 8 the framework, ExtJS, has released the Alpha version of their next major release.

This release is a rather large upgrade to the code base that Coldfusion uses and fully separates its reliance or dependence on other frameworks (yahoo ui toolkit for example).

The host of new features are too many to go into here so you can read about the major and exciting new features here. You can also read more about the general release news on their blog.

All I can say is that Jack Slocum and his crew do a fantastic job and I am continually impressed with the quality and level of their work. Add on top of that the three licensing options (open source, oem/reseller, and commercial) and you end up with a product that everyone can use.

An important thing to note is that this release while extensive has not significantly increased the size of the library. The whole library measures in at 522kb (thats everything you need) and it is possible to reduce that size rather significantly by importing only the library files that you need for a specific task. Though that being said the general practice is to include the ext-all.js file and be done with it.

Happy Coding...

As I mentioned in my post on Monday via a post on Ray Camden's site creating customized cell renderers are possible, though not officially supported in CFGRID.

What that actually means is that CF doesn't provide a simple way of specifying a cell render for a grid column as shown in the hypothetical code snipet below:

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We continue where we left off in EXT Grid Part 3. I won't bother this time in having the entire script block again rather just focusing on the next part of interest.

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