Well, when things get busy this place seems to be the first to go. Going to try and keep up with it better this year and post some new examples and some of the cool user extensions I’ve built over the past year.
Also, just wanted to drop a line to everyone to say that there will be some exciting progress for Ext.nd this year, and I will post about updates and changes here in the near future.
Well, it seems when things get busy this place is one of the first to get left behind. Unfortunately I don’t foresee things slowing down a whole lot until perhaps later this year. The Ext team has been working on some really exiting stuff though, and I can’t wait until we’re able to announce everything that is going on.
Lotusphere is coming up really quick, and I’m not sure if I will make it this year yet. Hopefully will have that figured out soon 
. Jack R will certainly be in attendance and has been working hard on getting Ext.nd ready to show off against Dojomino in BP103 Definitely check it out if you’re attending this year.
Times are definitely changing. I have been anti-mac for as long as I can remember… I never liked the idea that you couldn’t pick/choose your hardware and that you were really stuck with everything they gave you. I even avoided iPod’s and went for other non-proprietary mp3 players. Also, for years I built all of my own machines so that I could pick out decent graphics cards and such and not have to spend a fortune for a decent setup. As things have progressed my views have definitely changed and I’m certainly not a hardcore gamer like I used to be. My first step was picking up the new iPhone, with my massive travel schedule lately I wanted to have a way to access things easily and this seemed like a good way to do it. I was totally floored, the interface all worked just as I had expected, almost every website works perfectly fine… I couldn’t ask for more at this point. Then I found myself needing a new laptop as I needed a bit more power since I wind up working while traveling a great deal, and decided to give the Macbook Pro a shot. I most certainly do not regret my decision, and have now adjusted quite well to the mac after just over a month. I picked up a copy of parallels and threw windows xp on there so I could test (and still access domino designer). After dealing with a newer laptop running Vista I’m very glad to be away from it…
Who knows, maybe my next desktop purchase will even be a mac…
Things got sorta crazy for me (and Jack) over the past few months, as you can see one of the first things to go when I don’t have time tends to be this blog… Hopefully things settle down here some and I can keep things going.
The View has published an article that Jack and I wrote, it is available online for subscribers here. The article does a good job walking through an overview of Ext.nd and shows off a sample implementation with the new example tasks database Jack whipped up.
Also the latest version of Ext.nd has been released and is available at the normal download location in the Ext forums. This release has actually been ready to go for quite some time, and I think Jack sent out almost 50 preview copies to those that requested it. There were issues with licensing on top of lack of time to get it out the door. For now the Ext.nd project has shifted over to a pure GPL 3.0 license to line up with the change in Ext’s license. This allows us to still include the full Ext library within the notes database and not have to attempt to fuss with special extension licensing clauses that haven’t been finalized on the Ext side just yet. Check out the forum post for a listing of all the bug fixes and enhancements included in the release.
I’ve gotten access to a url we registered a couple years ago (http://www.extnd.net/) and hope to have some time to get an actual site built for the Ext.nd project. Stay tuned for updates on that site.
On a final note, I wanted to mention that even though we’ve had a large delay on the current release that certainly hasn’t prevented work on what will become the next release. I expect you’ll see a much faster turn around this time as much of what we wanted to accomplish is already complete. Beta 2 will likely be the largest architecture change of Ext.nd to date and really focuses on making the code better fit into the Ext 2.x way of doing things. Biggest changes off the top of my head include full categorized view support, full support for including Ext.nd components in any layout via xtype, much more control over configuration options, and a bunch more.
A colleague of mine, Shea Frederick, whipped up a really nice example integration of the Google Maps API and Ext JS. I had the chance to look at the demo a while back when there were some minor rendering issues, it appears that they’ve all been resolved and the result is really slick.
Check out the blog post for full details and code, or jump straight to the live example to play with it (don’t forget to pop up the extra windows by clicking on the buttons in the toolbar).
The best thing in my eyes is the GMapPanel component, which means that you can now include these Google maps anywhere in your layouts via the ‘gmappanel’ xtype.
