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.

As for the framework itself we’ve made some great progress lately. Jack has implemented a first pass at rendering categorized views and has done a lot of work to make them play nicely with a PagingToolbar. I’ve recently finished a large rewrite of the outline and view code to directly extend TreePanel and GridPanel. This change has allowed for much greater flexibility as we can now include domino components directly into an Ext layout via XType. The changes have allowed for some nice refactoring, leading to much cleaner code and increased performance.

Keep your eyes peeled, I’ll announce the release here and in the forums when it is available.

I’m not sure what I do and where I go is all that interesting, but you never know

• New web interface to the Ext.nd database
• New included demo database
• Simplified deployment, no longer a requirement to copy over tons of design elements
• Uses Ext 2.0.1
• New ViewSuggest component
• Automatic conversion of several basic @formulas
• Lots and Lots of Bug fixes

Check out the Release Thread for the download

Also a quick update on our new release. We’re almost finished with everything, just down to some final testing and cleanup before we release it as I expect this version to see a whole lot more use than the prior ones

I’m certainly excited to share everything that we’ve been working on and think the new release comes a long way in making things even easier on developers. Everything has also been converted over to the Ext 2.0 framework which alone provides vast improvements to performance and consistency.

Some things to look forward to:

• Simplified implementation – you no longer need to copy over design elements into your database
• Application Profiles – this is a bit more difficult to explain without going into a lot of detail, but the basic idea is that you will have an easy configuration form that will drive how Ext.nd deals with the various components within your application.
• Simplified HTMLHead/JSHeader – after filling out an application profile you can implement the Ext.nd code into a page or form with a single @DBLookup
• And More – There’s some other really cool stuff, but I want to leave some surprises

I’ll be moderating a BOF and giving a presentation showing off the Ext.nd project.

BOF104: Integrating Open Source AJAX/Javascript Frameworks with IBM Lotus Domino
- Monday 6:15PM – 7:15PM – Swan Peacock 2

BP207: From IBM Lotus Notes Client Application to AJAX-Powered Rich Internet Application in Less than 10 Lines of Code!
- Tuesday 8:30AM – 9:30AM – Swan Pelican

See you there!

new Ext.nd.form.ViewSuggest("category", {
    view: "(lookup.categories)",
    field: "Category"
});

I’ve included two copies, the first (extdemo.nsf) is the unmodified, extremely basic notes application. You can open it up on the web and enjoy all that wonderful HTML and Javascript that Domino generates for us

The first step is to make sure the Ext.nd database is somewhere easily accessible and even better yet, open in designer (ready for lots of copy and paste). Now copy and paste the “Ext.nd.Profile” and “Ext.nd.Session.js” forms, “(Ext.nd.Database)” subform, as well as “ExtND\Edit ExtND Profile Doc” and “($Ext.nd.NotesDXLExporter)” agents. From here, I would drop into the Notes client real quick and run the Edit profile doc agent. The profile form will come up and ask for a single field which is the absolute or relative file path to the Ext.nd database. This step is crucial, as Ext.nd uses this location to find all the Javascript and Agents it needs to function. One final step for the first part of the conversion is to create a new page, you’ll see in the final database that I created “demo.html”. Once you have your new empty page open its time to jump back over to the Ext.nd database in designer and get ready for some more copy and paste action. Open up the “Ext.nd.SampleMain.html” page and copy the entire HTML Head Content into your new page. Hop back over and grab the entire JS Header section as well. As you begin to learn Ext and Ext.nd you’ll become accustom to the code style from the JS Header and how to pass in various other configuration options. For now, we need to change the outlineName and viewName values to be a valid outline and view from your application. For the demo database I changed these to “mainOutline” and “allreq” respectively.

Phew… so we copied and pasted in a few elements, created a page, copied and pasted code into it, and made a minor configuration tweak. With that done it’s time to take a look at our page on the web.

Alright! Already looking better than the plain ‘ol setup that Domino spits out, but lets take a look at what we actually have here. The first thing that should strike your eye is the view, Ext.nd is making some Ajax calls behind the scenes to grab the xml values of the view and translate them into an Ext data grid. The grid has lots of nice features like paging (without page reload), column sorting (if column is marked to be sortable), Icon display, rearraging columns, selecting single or multiple rows, providing simple context menus, built in searching, and much more. So with a few simple lines of code we’ve brought a lot of the functionality normally found in the client views to the web!

Next thing that tends to stick out is the tabbed interface. Double click on any document within the view and notice that instead of moving the whole page away and loading the document, it will open up within a tab, you can easily click back on the tab with the view and open up a whole pile of documents. Clicking on any views in the outline will load them in place of any other view in the “main tab”.

Rather than keep babbling on and on, I’m going to split up this walk-through into a few posts, next time I’ll take a look at using the ViewTemplateDefault and outline we provide, then dive into converting over the form. All of these changes have already been done in the “extdemofinal.nsf” database that is provided.

Download the sample databases