Cutter's Crossing

I've been pretty busy this year, starting with my new position at work. And, having worked on major side projects the last three years running, I also took my after work time to spend some overdue quality time with my family. But, I did make time to work with Shea, Colin, and new author Nigel White, to work on the second edition of our Ext JS book, now titled Learning Ext JS 3.2. Released last Monday by Packt Publishing, our latest book brings Ext JS developers up to date in working with the 3.x framework, updating the content to cover many changes to the library as well as introducing several new chapters on key bits about Menus and Buttons, Plugins, Charting, and Ext.Direct.

Sencha (formerly Ext LLC) released Ext JS 3.3 on the same day that Learning Ext JS 3.2 shipped from Packt. There are several new and exciting features added in 3.3, but the core content of the book still aligns with the core of the framework itself, giving developers the tools and information they need to get off the ground running. There were several important changes to the framework between the last book (finalized just before the release of 2.2) and this one, and it was important to get that information out to those ready to learn. In the new chapter about Ext.Direct, I dissect the ColdFusion Server-side Stack, written by Sencha's Aaron Conran, to give the bare bones info needed for writing one's own server-side data marshalling services, going through the pieces step-by-step. Changes to the Data package were just one of the reasons to write this book. I know that Colin, Nigel, Shea, and myself, hope that everyone enjoys our latest work.

This entry was posted on October 18, 2010 at 11:56 PM and has received 2848 views. There are currently 6 comments. Print this entry.

Attached to this is my slide deck and sample code from my ColdFusion + ExtJs presentation here at cf.Objective() 2010. Overall it seemed to go really well, despite the typical technical difficulties, and though Ray said I needed to be a little more introductory (Thanks Ray. I appreciate the feedback.) I heavily commented the JavaScript in my source code, so hopefully that will help to fill in the gaps for people. If anyone has any questions, feel free to use the contact link at the bottom of the page.

I want to shout out to Aaron Conran of ExtJs, for providing me with a license for their new ExtDesigner to giveaway in my presentation. I pinged him last minute on this, and he really came through (Hope you like it Lance. Drop me your info to give back to Aaron.) For those who haven't checked it out yet, it's a fantastic tool, really well done, and more than worth the small price tag on it.

On a side note, I'm using a "work-in-progress" version of CFQueryReader in this sample. I'm in the process of refactoring to support some advanced features of Ext.Direct, and the new version will only be compatible with 3.2 and above. When I put it into SVN I'll add some notes on which revision is the cutoff for previous versions of ExtJs.

Update: I've added notes to the readme.txt file of the sample download with instructions on how to make the examples work in ColdFusion 8 as well.

This entry was posted on April 24, 2010 at 10:50 AM and has received 3331 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.

I have updated CFQueryReader, addressing issues that had arisen with new builds of ExtJs 3.x. This new build should cover sporadic issues with loading a new Ext.data.Store. There is also a simple example of using Aaron Conran's DirectCFM Ext.Direct ColdFusion API stack.

The CFQueryReader Example Site has been updated as well. You can update CFQueryReader from RIAForge.

This entry was posted on July 29, 2009 at 6:04 PM and has received 4016 views. There are currently 23 comments. Print this entry.

Yes, Ext Js 3.0 has finally arrived! This long awaited update to the popular library has finally hit the download page as a production ready build (though the Release Candidates have been pretty stable as it is). There are many great enhancements to Ext, including an even more consistent underlying model (how could it get more consistent?), and some exciting new data marshalling features.

A quick perusal of the updated Samples & Demos page gives us immediate insight into some of the new features that are available:

• Row Editor Grid - for full record edits
• Buffered Grid View - for faster rendering of large datasets
• Tab Panel Scroller Menu - for Tab Panels with lots of tabs
• Group Tabs - a vertical tab implementation
• Charts - several different chart types
• Check Tree - a tree view with a twist
• HBox and VBox layouts
• Toolbar Overflow
• Toolbar Button Groups
• ListView - a very lightweight grid implementation
• Updated QuickTips

There's a lot more that you'll have to dig to see, like improved browser support, a better container model, and (experimental) ARIA support (for accessabiltiy). Some of the greatest enhancements come in the way of the data marshalling capabilities added via the new Ext Direct. With Direct, Ext is providing the remoting specifications so that anyone can write data marshalling services around their favorite backend language. Ext has even published Example Server Side Stacks as a jumping off point to beginning with data marshalling via Direct. [Side Note: Aaron Conran, the team lead on the Ext Js team, is a long time ColdFusion guy, and he wrote the example CF stack.) By configuring your Direct API, you can utilize data readers and writers (they're new!) easily, even passing multiple requests within a single Ajax request. [Another Side Note: CFQueryReader is fully functional with and without Direct.]

One of the nicest features of this release is the backwards compatability. There are little to few changes that most will have to make, to upgrade their applications from 2.x to 3.0. And, it was announced, on a recent User Group Tour stop, that Adobe is including Ext Js 3.0 in ColdFusion 9. This opens up the possability of some very nice, new CFAjax components to come.

All in all a fantastic release. I've had the opportunity to play with 3.0 for a while now, watching the SVN updates daily, and my hat's off to the Ext Js crew for another excellent release.

This entry was posted on July 7, 2009 at 1:08 AM and has received 5014 views. There are currently 11 comments. Print this entry.

A while back, Justin Carter contacted me about some updates he was making to the ColdExt, a wrapper for the Ext JS library for ColdFusion. He had been looking at my CFQueryReader, as a reader for ColdFusion's JSON data return, and had noticed that there was no support for the 'root' attribute that's associated with most JSON readers in Ext. CFQueryReader is specifically designed for use with Query objects of ColdFusion 8's native JSON return type.

When I first wrote CFQueryReader, I was replacing the CFJsonReader with something better suited to the array structure used in the ColdFusion JSON return of a Query Object, and really did a one-for-one port. So, I took a deeper look at the issue Justin wanted resolved.

I did a deep comparison of Ext's ArrayReader and JsonReader source code, following everything that was being accomplished. What I found was how it used an internal accessor method to pull certain information on demand. I was able to refactor the reader to now support all of the base level meta attributes that are currently available to the ArrayReader: id, root, successProperty, and totalProperty.

In the previous version of CFQueryReader, when defining your fieldsets you were also required to uppercase the entire value of the column names. This is no longer a requirement either, although casing is important in identifying your 'root' and 'totalProperty' attributes.

The download below includes the reader, as well as some sample code showing how to implement it. I also setup these sample in a subdomain to show it working (requires Firefox with Firebug for full effect). There is a fair amount of comment documentation directly within the CFQueryReader.js file. A big shout out to Justin, Adam Bellas, and a few others, for helping me out with the testing.

This entry was posted on May 13, 2009 at 4:08 PM and has received 3582 views. There are currently 13 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.